Saturday, June 11, 2005

Dontsuku Festival

I recently went to see the "Dontsuku" festival in the quiet seaside town of Inatori. It's on the East coast of the Izu peninsular, which is famous for its natural hot spring baths. I went with my friend Neill, his wife Yuko, two of Neill's middle-aged English students, and some exchange students who were visiting from Malaysia. We took a leisurely 3 hour drive there, stopping by a quiet mountain town in central Izu for lunch at a great Soba restaurant. It felt great to be out in the countryside.

The festival takes place at night, so we wandered around the town looking for a nice Onsen (hot spring bath) to soak in. We found a hotel next to the ocean that had some baths available to the public. They were on the top floor, and both indoor and outdoor baths had great views! I also tried out their automatic foot massage machines - very nice! The sound of music drifted up to us, so we struggled out of the baths and made our way down to the main street where the festival was starting with dancing in the streets.

Then the parade started, which was made up of several groups of people (mainly girls) carrying shrines with statues of the local god inside. I should mention at this point that the local god has a lot to do with fertility and harmonious marital relations. They were working up quite a sweat jumping around with the shrines in time to a leader's vigorous whistling as they paraded, shouting and laughing along the way. One of the things they were chanting was "Don Don Tsuku Tsuku", which means "steadily/rapidly thrust thrust"!

Then the main shrine was brought out by a group of men. They were struggling a bit (that thing must have weighed tonnes) but the audience urged them along with cheering and clapping. It was great to experience such an easy-going atmosphere like this, because it goes against the typical stereotypes of Japanese people being reserved and shy.

After the parade the girls were more than happy to pose for a photo, as foreigners weren't very common in town. (I only saw 3 others at the festival.)
These spirits called Tengu were on many festival decorations.

Then there was some more usual festival entertainments like Shamisen and Taiko musicians, and the obligatory celebrity performance and rice-cake throwing. I didn't rush forward with the crowd to catch rice-cakes this time, but one came flying overhead and I made a fantastic one-handed catch. Too bad my reflexes weren't like that when I was playing cricket!

To finish the festival off, there was a spectacular fireworks show out over the sea, and as a finale a very long niagra (waterfall) firework was set off. It was a long drive back home after that, but we'd had a very interesting day!

2 Comments:

Blogger Owen said...

That's a very interesting festival, Ben, and I think you were fortunate to see that side of Japanese culture. As you said, it's not one that's evident in their every-day (shy and demure) personal interactions, but perhaps is evident more in their manga books and other media like that.

10:50 pm  
Blogger Ben said...

Yeah, there's definitely more to Japanese culture than first meets the eye.. The subcultures can be very different to the common image of Japanese culture.

3:09 pm  

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