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Keeping Back the Rains: Origins and Function of Japan's Gion Festivals
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20264 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
2,130 Words |
| Author
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Jon Burbank
Jon Burbank is a free-lance photojournalist living in Japan. |
On an early July evening in the Japanese town of Narita, moths and other bugs whirl around the streetlights under an obscured moon. There is enough daytime heat and humidity left in the air to bring up a sweat under the traditional light-cotton kimonos many people wear on the crowded streets below. The weather is typical, but the scene is very special. Late on this summer evening in nose to the grindstone/eyes to the textbook Japan, Narita's streets are crowded with people of all ages, boisterously laughing and smiling.
The streets clear for a cluster of young men dressed in what look like white togas; they strain under the crosswork of shining black beams resting on their shoulders. The beams support a black lacquer and gold shrine, topped by a beautifully detailed, glittering gold pheasant. This small shrine, the mikoshi, is the reason for the crowds.
Inside the mikoshi is the image of Fudo Myo-o (the god of fire), the chief deity of nearby Shinsho-ji (New Victory Temple). During the three days and nights of Narita Gion (July 7-9), Fudo Myo-o is carried past each home and business in the city, from the smallest noodle shop to Narita's two large department stores. The god's blessing, bestowed on each home and business the mikoshi passes, protects households and brings prosperity and good health for the next year.
The young men jog, chanting rhythmically to help them carry their heavy load. Clouds cover the moon above, hinting at rain and reminding people why this festival started over a thousand years ago in the old imperial capital of Kyoto.
Throughout June and early July, summer rains called tsuyu or baiu sweep across Japan, just as the monsoon sweeps across the Indian subcontinent. The monsoon brings plentiful crops for India's millions of subsistence farmers. It also guarantees those newspaper and TV scenes of rickshaws being pulled through waist-deep water in flooded streets and stranded villagers frantically waving to a relief helicopter. For centuries, the rains similar potency in agricultural, preindustrial Japan. They brought bountiful harvests but also life-threatening floods and epidemics of waterborne diseases.
In A.D. 869 the rains were especially heavy. Messengers brought reports of widespread disaster and diseases to the empire's new capital, Heian-kyo (today's Kyoto). The capital had been moved there from Nara about seventy-five years earlier, with the object of creating a second, grander version of the Chinese
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