Festival (祭り/matsuri) Boshita! (Beat them!) /Continuity and Change)

Alan Booth wrote of the intoxication of a matsuri (festival) in the North of Japan, in his Roads to Sata. Once I got over comparing them with Spanish fiestas, I could enjoy Japanese matsuri in their own terms, spectacles for the populace, rather than the transformation of a whole city into a festival. (The first scenes in Marcel Carne’s classic, Les Enfants du Paradis [The Children of the Gods] will give you a good idea of what I mean.)

Like Spanish cities and towns, every place in Japan has its main festival, though without being as clearly defined as the fiesta mayor in Spain. In Kumamoto, there is no doubt that the big one is the matsuri of one of the two main Shinto shrines in the city, Fujisaki-gu.

A big procession heads out from the shrine at around six in the morning of the second Saturday in September, meanders through the city, and ends up in Shin-machi,[New Town] (one of the oldest areas, in the shadow of the Castle), and disperses. After a few hours of “asobi” [lit. “play” --having a good time], the procession reassembles and heads back the way it came.

I am not sure of the order but the main components of the procession are: the “Gods”, (three I think), who ride in ceremonial wagons; “samurai” in full armour, some riding and some walking; horses, huge beasts from the mountains of Aso, which are distributed throughout the procession, each with a team of attendants, who try and keep them from going berserk, while provoking them to do just that, with raucous bugle calls, and by feeding them sake; and finally the “groups”, each representing some organization, perhaps the Old Boys/Girls of a high school or a company. Each group has fifty of so people, all dressed in a festive uniform, and all chanting and dancing their way through the streets.

Participating can be an expensive business. Once you add on the cost of the pre-dawn session to the uniform and the affiliation fee, a young girl may pay 30,000 yen ($500NZ—2002 exchange rate!) for the right to start out on her day of fun.

I was disappointed to find that the rest of the population simply watches the parade go by, and hours later, watches it go back again. They may also throw coins in the direction of the passing Divine carriages. (The link between money and religion is even more overt in Shinto than it is in Christianity.)

As the parade marches through the street, the participants chant the same short phrase with indefatigable energy. For the first ten years I was in Kumamoto, it was “Boshita! Boshita!” which means “We beat them! We beat them!” The “we” is the Japanese who were identifying with their seventeenth century forebears who, under the warlord Hideyoshi　Toyotomi, invaded and occupied Korea.

I had been teaching a course about Northern Ireland and colonization to my students, and could see obvious parallels between the “Boshita” parade and the Orange Parades in the North--except that in Kumamoto the presence of the 700 strong Korean community was discrete to the point of invisibility. It occurred to no-one that I spoke to that the “Boshita!” chant might upset Koreans.

In the early nineties though, the chant suddenly changed, from “Boshita” to “Dookai! Dookai!” (“How was it?”), an anodyne phrase, obviously chosen for its inability to give offence to any ethnic group. After the battles and knife edge negotiations in Northern Ireland over the tiniest details of the Parades, it was intriguing to see that there was neither resistance nor even discussion about the change of the 400 year old chant. I would imagine that most of the young people on the procession this year had no idea that “Dookai! Dookai!” was not an ancestral tradition.

My Noh studies gave me an insight into another usually unknown aspect of the festival. Even the participants usually have no idea of the real purpose of the procession, nor of what happens during the hours the Gods are in Shinmachi [New Town]. In fact, when everyone else heads off for some refreshments and a rest, the Gods are taken up a side street and lined up in front of the Noh stage where I practised every week. There they watch a full programme of Noh and Kyougen, beginning with an okina Noh, one which is performed for the Gods.

Between the Gods and the stage there is room for no more than a couple of hundred spectators. The seats are always taken well before the performance starts around nine in the morning, so there is no need to advertise. The fact that the whole festival is built around the Gods’ expedition to see Noh is known by few people in the city.

While the Boshita parade is full of male sound and fury, the August O-Bon (All Souls’) festival in the neighbouring city of Yamaga is the quintessence of traditional femininity. The core of that festival is the “bon odori”, the dance of around a thousand Yamaga women, on the Friday and Saturday nights of the Buddhist festival. Each woman wears a light-coloured summer kimono, and a paper lantern lit with a candle on her head.

The sight of a thousand women dancing with the grace and dignity worthy of their ancestors, slowly moving in a vast circle, of the mass of swaying lanterns set against the black summer sky, to the accompaniment of taiko [drums] is profoundly moving.

I remembered the Sardana,　the equally grave circle dance of Catalonia. (There is a superb photograph of the Sardana in a country village taken during the lean years of Franco in Josep Pla’s book Catalunya.)

Several years after first seeing the Yamaga festival, I took two friends, a Franco-Korean couple who were in their first year in Kumamoto, to see it. I got the shock of my life to find that the music had been transformed into a synthesized mess of muzak, and the power of the swaying lanterns subverted by massive TV screens showing the performance live to the people who were already there.

I looked around me but could discern no sign of anyone sharing my consternation. It was as if nobody had noticed any change. People seemed just as happy as they had been two years before when I had first been at the festival. While people in Kumamoto do have a profound love of tradition, they also tend to be passive in their acceptance of whatever media-influenced perversions are decreed by the publicity departments of the local bureaucracies.