In an average Japanese festival, every detail of every action, every word and every decoration holds a grave significance. And in Nagasaki, as we have seen, the gravity has been turned up to 11.
Okunchi Matsuri is really too big for me to describe, in words or pictures. The history is so deep and complex any book on it would come in volumes and the feeling of being there is so vast, four years later it’s still sinking in. This is an impression of what I saw and what I know. You want the real thing there’s only one way to get it, go there and see for your self, haha sorry! Deal!
1. Niwamise – a.k.a. Please Look at My Garden, and Don’t Kill Me!
Niwamise is the prelude to Okunchi. The word means something along the lines of ‘Look at my Garden!’, on the surface a nice sentiment for a notably hospitable people, but this garden party has a convoluted and dark history. Okunchi, held on the following weekend, is an outrageous celebration of Shinto traditions, involving three days of the most intense and extravagant dance performances in all Japan.
But Niwamise comes first, and involves all the paraphernalia associated with the festival being displayed for the entire town to traipse through and inspect. The anticipation of the weekend’s performances is built here and the festival atmosphere is captivating.
Okunchi happens all over Japan, but only in Nagasaki is it so amplified, and only Nagasaki has Niwamise, where each of the seven participating townships hires major retail and outdoor spaces in the centre of town to display the floats, clothes and gifts that are their festival contribution, in ostentatious surroundings, no expense spared.
For example, the Kimono they have had made for the Okunchi performers. (These will be worn for the festival only, will be in most cases ruined by the sweaty, violently athletic dances, and cost around £500 - £1000 a piece)
Why? The usual reason - Nagasaki is the town that lived for 400 years under the severe suspicion of the Catholic-hating Shogunate, which had closed Japan’s borders to all influence foreign, especially European, and absolutely Christian, with grisly consequences for any transgressor.
Nagasaki came under the severe scrutiny of Japan’s isolationist government, because the Portugese had tried so hard to Catholicise it (and done so well), and after they were violently booted out, the Dutch held a small trading post there for over 200 years. Meaning Nagasakians had to work extra hard to prove they weren’t Christian (many of them were).
So stringent was the Shinto inquisition that, in effect, any half hearted display of enthusiasm for a Shinto festival could become grounds for a death sentence.
Niwamise was two things, a) a chance to shout from your rooftop, ‘Hey everyone! Look at the extravagance I have gone to for what should really be a simple Shinto affair, p.s. I’m not a Catholic please oh please don’t kill me cheers’ and b) a time for people to have a really good snoop around your house, they would look for Catholic paraphernalia, and if they found any you would be boiled alive.
Niwamise is also a chance to pay a tribute to the performers. The men, just neighbourhood guys, who perform the showcase dances train incredibly hard every night from June to October to prepare for the insane three day run of constant laborious dance. For which their rewards, gifted by their neighbours, employers, shopkeepers etc., are displayed to all with tremendous fanfare.
Niwamise is truly Nagasakian, and truly Japanese. It harks back with amazing clarity to the era when a fearfully conservative shut-off nation was coming to grips with a world accelerating into the modern age. It also cements communities together, through the tireless training of each town’s beloved performers, the support and tribute of their neighbourhoods and the delight in just making it all happen.
2. Everything that isn’t the Dances - Parades and Wigs and 200 Kilo Umbrellas
Over the festival weekend, everyone gets behind their town. The reason for this festive season is the kami (=demi god) of Nagasaki’s central shrine being carried around town, and he’s gotta be shown a good time.
So what do kami want to see? They want to see that the town they look after is doing well, that everyone is having a good time, is making lots of money, drinking lots of booze and, Shinto being a classic old school religion… making lots of babies.
So good times are had, no expense is spared, booze gets consumed and lots of babies get… well not necessarily made but paraded around town. Shinto is, like many truly ancient religions, all about fertility. Some Japanese festivals take this aspect so far as to turn your stomach. Nagasaki, for once, takes a delicate approach, the offspring of the town are made an integral part of the show, especially in the huge parades through town, and the kami can see that his town is prospering.
The costumes worn are layered with more historical detail than this blogger knows (the young archer above: his arrows are feathered in the style of one imperial era, the bow is from another, each particular with it’s own weighty significance… sorry, my knowledge has to end somewhere apparently :)). Either way the immaculate detail is applied to every part of the process, and although the layers of dense historical significance were unfortunately lost on this observer, the passion for this celebration could not have been more clear.
So what else can we magnify to ludicrous proportions? Umbrellas? Hell yes umbrellas! Kasaboko, a kind of decorative umbrella used in festive dances, are dainty affairs by all accounts, usually looking something like this, but what do we know about Nagasaki?
Yep, the Kasaboko here weigh up to 250 kilograms and are lumbered around town by one individual who, I’m told, has no other occupation than to train to carry a Kasabo of this size.
Unsurprisingly, there’s not much dancing to be done with this on your back, the climax of the Kasaboko show is to see them spinning at high speed, a feat not easily controlled or stopped, which sees a huge reaction from an adoring crowd.
Every bit of me wants to a describe giant, spinning, over-adorned, 250 kilo umbrella dance as novel, but in this case I just can’t. This is history people, it’s serious stuff.
3. The Dances
Now when I say ‘dances’…
For each of the seven participating towns, the dance centrepiece is a massive wooden float, often a ship, (sometimes a dragon or whale) which the performers drag into the square of Nagasaki’s Suwa shrine. There are three performance areas around the town, at the shrine, the station, and the shopping centre, and the float is hauled from one to the other for three displays at each place every day. That’s nine dances a day, for three days.
The extreme physical commitment demanded of the performers pushes them to breaking point. Having trained daily for four months for this one weekend of their lives, they haul that float from point to point, for three days, and dance.
Not a nimble display of prancing around the float, the float itself is made to dance with a mad energy. Hauled around, at sprinting speed, from A to B to C, in circles, in diagonals, start, stop, start again, and again.
When the flanking flagsmen whip the signal to go, the team sprints across the square. The square is not that wide you might say, and you’d be right. There is no space to get a foot wrong, and exactly at the moment they reach full speed, they lurch their bodies in the other direction, dig their heels into the flagstones, and by mere inches, stop the x tonnes of wooden ship from careening into the front row, where the mayor’s wife is sat. Incidentally, look closely below and you can see that there are kids in the boat drumming, never missing a beat.
And then on. The crowd won’t let them go and they scream the traditional call back - ‘Motte koi motte koooiiiiii!’ an old Nagasaki dialect word not used anywhere else but at this festival. If they give it enough minerals, the guys might be tempted to bring the float back and dance again, on the first day of they festival the guys are full of it and come back three or four times, but eventually they have to move on.
There are over 200 steps up to Suwa, the negotiation of which, down and then back up again later, is taxing enough.
And around they go, in day, at night. Seven towns a year take part, on a rotation bases so that all the old townships of Nagasaki take their turn. These men will do this only once in their lives, so the energy of a lifetime is put into this weekend.
And for all they give, every participant is loved in return, the crowd scream ecstatically at every turn, jump and charge. Generations of Nagasaki folk witness here the preservation of their city’s completely unique, madly overblown and wonderful traditions. This city has been put through some of the strangest and harshest twists of history, so when Nagasaki celebrates, there’s no holding back.
Suwa Shrine, Nagasaki. Oct. 2007.
