The Festival Where Everyone's a Human Packanimal

Gion time around Japan has come and Kusu's big three neighborhoods, Mori, Tsukawaki and Kitayamada are pulling out the chocks on their yamaboko floats and gathering the locals to pull, pull, pull. I had a half-day of this yesterday and I gotta say, in retrospect, participation instead of sideline observation might have been a bad idea. You see, a lot about Japanese culture has to do with enduring hardships and taking bullets for the team. It's sort of the origin of the Japanese word ganbaru, which is just about the most common phrase you'll hear in Japan and means to endure XYZ and press on. If that doesn't seem like such a bad thing to say or mean, trust me, when it's a matter of course and not an exception to be suffering and getting shafted, and then just saying this magical phrase to smooth it all over, yeah, it's crappy.

Back to the point. Like I said in a previous post, I'm pulling the Mori yama this year, which I'm fairly sure is a safe thing to do despite what Hide said to Makoto. There's a certain disappointment in that, like a faint hope I'd be caught in a Jets/Sharks-esque rivalry. One can always hope. The yama's not nearly as big as the one in the below video, but it's pretty hefty and there aren't many of us doing the work. I guess attendance is down as the lures of the modern world pull people away from the traditional to other things. So there's about twelve of us pulling a two-storey, several ton float made of wood and metal with a small performance stage and up to six musicians and actors riding it. Oh, and the wheels are wood.



--Matt