I Like Pigeons Because Nobody Else Does

Mr Hanzawa and I had a great weekend, thanks to lousy weather. San Diego was recipent of quite a bit of rainfall on Sunday morning so we spent the morning at the Natural History Museum visiting the Pompeii exhibit and, when it stopped raining, ventured over to the zoo. We almost had the run of both places and it was fantastic. Monday brought clear skies, so we hiked 6 miles in Cuyamaca Rancho State Park before he caught the Amtrak train back to Los Angeles.

The Soma Nomaoi festival started over 1000 years ago in the year 973 when the founder of the Soma family, Taira no Masakado, used wild horses in a military exercise in which he released them on the plains for his cavalry to pursue and capture. In the following years the custom was passed on to successive clan leaders as an homage to the clan and also Shinto deities.

We left Yokosuka at 3am. I looked around at the other passengers on the bus and was shocked to find myself the only one not sleeping. How on earth anyone can sleep when going to a new place is beyond me. It gets light here at 4:30am and by that time we were heading out the north end of Tokyo, leaving the concrete behind and entering into the countryside. It was so nice to get out of the city - even if only for a day – and breathe fresh air.

We arrived at 9am and I paired up with a really cool chick named Nathalie. Not wanting to be seen with a group of loud Americans, we quickly bailed out and made our way to the parade or ogyouretsu お行列. We found seats on the curb, but that didn’t suit the trio of ojiisans (grandpas) behind us who insisted we sit we sit in the shade with them as soon as they rearranged themselves and made room.  I’m always a hit with the old men here as soon as I start unleashing the Canon camera equipment.

I’m a fan of Akira Kurosawa movies and what I saw coming down the street made me feel as if I were in Ran or Seven Samurai - legions of samurai on the backs of horses of the highest athletic caliber, complete with swords at their sides were making their way down the street. Nathalie and I stood there agape for the entirety of the parade. The reason they looked real was because this was about as real as it gets without access to a time machine. I read in my festival guide that the armor, helmets, swords and horse tack are all original and not reproductions. Most of them have been passed down through the years from father to son.

The festival spans 3 days, but we were there on the second day which has the most action.  After the parade, all 600 riders filed into a racetrack area and prepared for kacchu-keiba 甲冑競馬, or race of 10 riders and horses at a time. Ten horses and riders gathered at a starting point and raced once around the track or 1000 meters.

The shinki-sodatsusen 神旗争奪戦、or flag scramble, started at 1pm with an explosion of fireworks directly above the grass field inside the racetrack. Out of the explosion fell two flags which the boiling throng of horses and men were waiting to catch. The triumphant knight who catches the flag breaks from the scrum and charges up the hill on a path winding through the spectators to claim his prize.

This was definitely one of the coolest things I’ve done here and I am so glad I didn’t let the early departure dissuade me from going.  The festival has been designated as Important Cultural Property and seems to have some notoriety outside Japan. I saw a crew of western filmmakers there, but I couldn’t tell what kind of white they were. I’d love to know what they were all about but they were busy filming the action and I didn’t want to bug them. Besides, I had my own photography to take care of and wasn’t in the mood to waste time socializing. Their t-shirts said “Soma 2007 Documentary Film Crew” or something like that. So if someone sees anything about this on TV in the coming years, please let me know.

I guess the really appealing aspect of this was the history. Being American means you probably don’t have too deep of a cultural history. Half the people there don’t even know what their real family names were before they were butchered and abbreviated when coming through Ellis Island. I just can’t imagine having such a deep and old history like this. It must be so cool to be such an integral part of a country and its land.

The samurai festival was simply unbelievable. It may have been the coolest cultural event I’ve seen here, but I am really interested in samurai history. To see people you’ve only read about in history books, as if they just stepped out of a time machine, was something I’ll never forget. I am busy today and most of the day tomorrow with lessons so I don’t have a whole lot of time to do a write-up right now. I took over 500 photos and I need to sort through them and do some editing. So check back for a decent narrative and photos later this week. Here are a few in the meantime:

With the frenetic zeal of Lancastrians scurrying to the grocery store on a bread and milk mission, the Navy jokers shut the whole place down yesterday in anticipation of typhoon Man-Yi. And then nothing happened. The storm broke up and all we got was some heavy rain. Hardly even any blowing. By 5pm I could look across the bay and see the sun shining in Chiba. I was hoping for some exciting extreme weather, but was sorely disappointed.  The typhoon did some serious damage on the southern islands, but had petered out by the time it moved north to Tokyo.

I went to a BBQ at a friend’s house on Saturday, but the party was kept indoors by the heavy rain from the approaching typhoon. As you can see from the photo, we were limited to grilling yakitori from the patio door.

I have a couple of things going on in the next week. One of my students, Mr Hanzawa is an accomplished musician and I am going to one of his practice sessions on Sunday and then joining the group at an izakaya afterwards. Next Tuesday I am going on a base-sponsored bus trip to Fukushima, about 6 hours north of here, to a huge samurai festival called the Soma Nomaoi Battle Festival:

Soma-Nomaoi is a Shinto ritual annually held for 3 days from July 23 to 25 in Minami Soma City, Fukushima Pref. In this historical event, 500 mounted horsemen in traditional samurai armor ride through the towns and head for the open field, where they scramble for shrine flags of the three Myoken Shrines in this region and pursue unsaddled horses to capture as offerings to a Shinto deity. Soma-Nomaoi has its origin in a military exercise done more than 1,000 years ago by General Taira no Masakado, the ancestor of the later holders of the Soma clan, in which he released wild horses on to the plain for his cavalry to pursue and capture. The residents of ancient “Go (an administrative territory)” act as samurai horsemen, and each “Go” belongs to one of the three shrines of Nakamura Shrine, Ota Shrine, and Odaka Shrine. Soma-Nomaoi was nationally designated as an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property in 1978.  

I’ve never travel with groups of Americans here because so many of them are on American-style behavior and it’s embarassing, but this is a photography opportunity that was hard to pass up.  The other problem is the logistics of the trip – the bus leaves at 3am!!! and returns at 11pm that night. Which will be painful, but at least I’m not driving.

Gene and I are going to Tokyo this weekend to do some sightseeing and eating. Not a whole lot going on otherwise. It’s pouring down rain right now and if it continues tomorrow it will put a serious damper on our fun.

I took the preliminary paperwork to a crabby guy at the shipping office yesterday to have our household items shipped back to the states. So now we have to go to a “PCS counseling meeting” on June 4th. What that involves, I have no idea, but it will likely be painful.

More sumo photos:

May 23, Rikishi quotes

Asashoryu to the throng of reporters surrounding him in the dressing room:

“Don’t get too close to me!”

Asashoryu on his first loss:

 ”My tachi-ai sucked. I looked past him too much, but that’s sumo for you…a trapdoor where you least expect it. I failed at the tachi-ai, I failed myself, it was all a failure. But hey, I’ll have fun chasing him down.”

I spent most of the weekend reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. I didn’t like it.  I think I will give up on Murakami since this is the second of his books I have not liked. They are wildly popular the world over, but the two I read failed to do much for me.

Today was Yokosuka’s annual mikoshi parade and the weather was perfect for the festivities. A mikoshi is a portable Shinto shrine that is borne through town streets on the shoulders of up to as many as a hundred people, usually during a festival.  The parade started near the train station and concluded on base.  It was a great photo opportunity to practice people shots. I am really hesitant to invade someone’s space that way, but today was an exception since everyone else was doing the same thing.