Because This is What We Do in Japan...

Hey dude,

What size shoe do you where?

Bryce



This was the email that I sent to Sean a week before he arrived in Japan. Little did he know that I had signed him up for an all-day omikoshii event that involved dressing up in traditional Japanese garments and carrying a massive shrine over our shoulders for a good 8 hours throughout the day. Of course, in exchange for our services, we were provided with both food and drink for the day.

The night before the event was somewhat of a long one in that a number of other foreigners arrived in Iwaki who needed to be entertained. We ended up doing a spicy ramen challenge in Ueda for dinner and then going to Est Est for a night of drinks and foosball. Also unbeknownst to Sean at the time, there was a bit of a housing shortage for these foreigners, so I offered my apartment as a place where people could sleep; not many others volunteered their apartments and I ended up with 7 guests at my place including Sean. It was a bit tight in the apartment, but one guest offered himself as the sacrificial lamb who would sleep without futon, in the kitchen beside the garbage can. All of us slept much better that night knowing that we could all stretch out our toes.

Despite the soundness of our slumber however, the few drinks that we had leading up to bedtime left us feeling a bit rough for our 6 o’clock awakening. With me being the host, I felt that it was somewhat my duty to see that everyone in the apartment wake up and be ready to leave on time, and so, the night before, promised everybody that I would put on some Slayer in the morning to get people moving. I of course, kept my promise and we were ready to leave on time.

From my apartment we drove to Yotsukura, which is one of the Oceanside areas of Iwaki and where the omikoshii festival was to take place. We started out in an old warehouse building that didn’t have running water. We were separated, male and female, by a massive blue tarp in a large room so that we could change. It was here that we stripped all of our foreign flare and donned our traditional Japanese attire. The first to go on were a pair of white shorts called “matahiki” that are kept up by a string that gets tied around the waist. These were a bit difficult to get on, but the Japanese people helping us had no qualms about reaching into all kinds of places proximate to our bodies to get them on. Next there was a long white cloth wrapped around our lower torso to the point where many of us could not breathe – this was called a “sarashi”; these garments resembled somewhat of a cloth weightlifter’s belt – maybe for back support? Finally, our happis, or robe-like shirts went on top and were tied with a blue obi. We were also given “tenugui” to go around our heads and our special omikoshii shoes called “tabi,” which were mostly white socks that separated our big toes and had a thin rubber sole on the bottom. It was also recommended that we bring a small towel as a cushion for our shoulders against the mikoshii shrine, so some of us had a slight padded-shoulder-look about us as well.

From the warehouse, we walked to a nearby shrine, where our mikoshii, or portable shrines were waiting. I think there were about 3 mikoshi that belonged to the shrine that were to be paraded about the town that day. Each shrine had already been fitted with 6 x 6 wooden beams to support the mikoshi – 2 short pieces about 4m wide and 4 long pieces about 8m lengthwise from front to back. Our mikoshi, I believe was among the largest and most heavy. At the shrine, we all took pictures and had our ‘cleansing’ drink of sake before we picked up our respective mikoshis. We then performed small demonstrations at the shrine grounds and were on our way into the city.

Although we had several Japanese members in our party, carrying the mikoshi was brutally difficult for many of us foreigners. Sean and I figured that the entire apparatus of Shrine and support beams easily weighed over a thousand pounds. Many of us foreigners also had the problem that we were quite taller than most of the Japanese members; we were always burdened with choosing to either carry the brunt of the weight ourselves, or walk in awkward hunched over positions (although, I should mention that many of us were just plain soft as many of the taller and more seasoned Japanese men had no problem with carrying the weight of the mikoshi on their own). After seeing more omikoshi over the next few days in Tokyo, I think that another problem we faced as foreigners was that we were all afraid to get too close to each other. Many of the Japanese teams would squeeze together so that they could fit almost twice as many people and dissipate the weight amongst themselves. This was something that our foreigner notions of personal space would not quite allow for. I also heard someone say that last year everyone did a much better job of rotating shifts for carrying the mikoshii – whereas this year, we tended to burden ourselves with longer, more exhausting shifts.

Although I knew a little more about omikoshi than Sean, I didn’t know what to expect when we first started our carrying. As it turned out, as soon as we left the shrine, the streets were lined with people cheering us on like we were the new parade in town. We also learned very quickly that the massive shrine we were carrying was also a type of collection bin for donations. People would wrap coins in small tissue papers and then throw them into the shrine to either catch in its ornery, or land in the net that hung as a catch basin below it. Many of the spectators were very young or very old, and their aim wasn’t exactly precise, so under the weight of the massive shrine with large beams of timber digging into our shoulders, we often endured the pelting of these projectile donations.

The carrying of an omikoshi is also more than just a procession for an oversized collection plate – it is a celebration that holds a lot of energetic reverence for the shrine itself. While many of us approached the task with a mentality of arduously rolling a large boulder up a hill, there was a lot of fanfare from the people cheering us on and from the more experienced members of our party. We all had our motivational cheers that we shouted like soldiers in a military procession. I think we would shout things like “huru,” or “usa,” in time with our drill sergeants who rhythmically blew their whistles at us. I asked several people what it was we were saying, but no one seemed to know or understand. The closest that anybody could approximate for me was that we were saying something that resembled “let’s do it!” over and over in many different ways. Most of the Japanese shrine carriers also had kind of a cool marching swagger to them as we marched down the streets. Anytime we stopped or slowed down to make a turn, most of us would stop our feet dead in the ground and try to find a better repositioning of the shrine, whereas, the proper way to do things was to keep the feet marching and arms swinging with big smiles on our faces. To keep up the intensity, it was also important that we rhythmically bob and shake the shrine as much as possible on our shoulders, so that all of the dangling ornery of the shrine would rattle against itself in a cacophonous jangle. Because of this continuous movement, rhythm was very important; you don’t want your shoulder to be moving upwards when everybody else and the shrine is suddenly dropping downwards.

The climax of the omikoshi carrying was when we arrived at the beaches of Yotskura. Most of us had been to this beach before for the Iwaki Beach Bomb, which was a kind of a large welcoming party for the new ALTs arriving last August. As we went up and over the steps leading over the concrete barrier separating the city streets from the ocean, the beaches were filled with people who came to see the shrines carried into the ocean. There were also half a dozen or so other shrines that were lined up on the beaches with their teams preparing to go into the water.

After carrying the shrine across the wet sand and seaweed, we set the shrine down and prepared to get wet. We stripped off our shirts and put them in plastic bags for safekeeping and at least for me, it was about this point where I realized how ridiculous most of us looked. Somehow, the Japanese omikoshi carriers around us, even though many of them wore nothing but skimpy loin cloths, looked more natural in this environment. We also had a glimpse of some carriers from another shrine who were supposedly professionals who carry omikoshi every weekend. Their shoulders were raw with either bruises or blisters – I’m not sure which, that were without out exaggeration, as large as baseballs. Much like the cauliflower ears of wrestlers, these extraneous masses of flesh are referred to as “octopus heads.”

Before entering the ocean, we all crouched down beside our respective shrines and listened to some old man chant at us while the people around us responded with unified cheers of response. I couldn’t make much sense of what was going on and everybody was very quiet at the time, so I thought it better not to ask questions. Instead, I waited while looking out to the water where the waves rolled in onto the sand.

With the sound of a whistle – or maybe a shout, I can’t remember which, we all heaved the shrine onto our shoulders and marched towards the ocean. The water was colder than I expected and my legs quickly became numb and white with goose bumps. We went into the water to about our waists and every time a wave came into us, we could feel everybody’s grips on the shrine slip slightly as it became suddenly heavier. Water splashed all over us, our grip on the wood became very slippery, and my glasses, which I neglected to remove before entering the ocean, were doused with ocean water.

The same sort of energetic fervour was still present in the water as was on dry land. People blew whistles at us while we shouted our ambiguous mantras in response. We shook the shrine back and forth while others pushed on us so that we spun in circles before moving back towards the shore. Then, the shouting would increase and we would turn around again and return deeper into the ocean and turn some more. This pattern would repeat it self several times, before, after what seemed like a good 10-15 minutes in the water (although I’m sure it was probably more like 3-4 minutes), we finally returned to the shore.

All of this happened before lunch, and by the time we carried our shrines back to the shore, put our shirts back on, and ate a lunch of soup and rice balls – and a little beer and sake for some, it was still before 1 o’clock. There was some talk about putting the shrine in the back of a truck and parading it around while riding behind in a bus – and we did do this briefly on the way to a second meal break, but for the most part, we ended up carrying the shrine around until after 6 o’clock. Most of the photos that I took throughout the day, where everybody appears energetic and smiling, were taken in the morning portion of our ordeal. Not only did people lose their lustre for having their pictures taken, I also seemed to lack the energy to open and close my shutter.

As difficult as the day was, I really appreciated how no exceptions were made for us as foreigners; there were no concessions granted to us. No matter how big or small we were, or how much we complained, we were all expected to carry; we didn’t take any short cuts; we didn’t go home early; and we were expected to shake and rattle the mikoshi with as much fervour as everyone else. We ended up visiting several businesses, who as I understood, made several donations to the shrine in order to receive our blessings. In this sense, it was our duty to make sure we went to all of these places to offer the blessings of our shrine. At times, it almost seemed a bit absurd as we squeezed ourselves into parking lots between BMWs and other pristine luxury cars, but within all of the chaos, it all seemed quite natural.

In the end, we were also rewarded the same as everyone else as we all went back to a hotel to clean up and bathe in a quick onsen before a night of dinner and drinking. By the end of the night, I was fully exhausted and full of good food and beer. I think Sean was able to enjoy himself throughout the day as I saw him a few times sitting on the tatami floors with various Japanese people who were curious and willing to try their English with him. I also had to carry home in my camera bag Sean’s tabi that he had worn on his feet for the duration of our mikoshi carrying. Most of us threw ours away, but Sean, even though they were dirty and frayed around the edges from walking through sand and salt water, and from being stepped on, and dragged across pavement for 8 hours, I think he found sentimentality in them that was worth taking home with him. For me, a photo of Sean’s dirty size 11-11.5 feet will have to do.