Tripping the Light Fantastic

Come late summer, when northern Japan has finally shaken the memory of the frigid winter that piles snow up to windows, the giant taiko drums begin to beat, the bamboo flutes start to twitter and the spectacular handmade floats of heroes and warriors come a-rolling.

Thousands of dancing men and women frolic along in the streets in a nightly parade, chanting a rhythmic “Ra Say Ra, Ra Say Ra, Ra Say Ra Say Ra Say Ra.” They wear cloth robes with orange cloth strips strung around arms and back, and strings of bells jiggling from their sashes. Plastic fruits drape from straw hats.

It is uta time, and this largely agricultural region comes alive with a series of spectacular festivals, drawing visitors by the millions to several cities on the northern part of Japan’s main island, Honshu.

No one is sure exactly what gave rise to these summer matsuri , or festivals, that the government has designated National Cultural Assets. But they undoubtedly rank among the most beautiful, the most hypnotic, and the most enchanting festivals in Japan, if not the world. The festivals are as much manna for the local economy as for the spirit. Hotels are booked for months beforehand for the matsuris , which last up to a week. Aomori’s six-day event drew 3.7 million visitors this year, according to the city.

The festivals are believed to have originated as rites to eliminate summer disasters and evils from society, says Toshikazu Shinno, professor of Japanese folklore at the University of Tsukuba outside of Tokyo. The images used for the floats draw on Chinese legends, also popular in Japan. “They need a strong warrior to eliminate these disasters,” Shinno says.

Legend has it that farmers have to shake off the sleepy feeling that comes from hibernating during the long winters, or perhaps, more relevantly, after lunch during the key summer planting and harvesting months. The kanji characters for nebuta mean “sleepy devil.” The Aomori festival--the most raucous of all--celebrates victory after battle, whereas Hirosaki’s variation, which over the years has come to be called neputa , is more subdued, and is said to reflect gathering strength before going off to battle.

Aomori’s festival climaxes with the best of its floats--beautiful, 50-foot-tall creations made of paper and wire and lighted from within--loaded on barges and set sailing across the northern bay on the final night as magnificent fireworks crescendo overhead.

Imagine, say, the floats of the Rose Parade, except in Aomori instead of flowers, 10,000 small pieces of paper are glued and painted onto to artfully shaped wire figures. Inside a float, up to 800 lightbulbs and a generator weighing more than a ton bring it all to life on the nightly parade route for six nights in early August.

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A 40-minute train-ride away at Hirosaki, 70 floats in the shape of giant fans also light up the night. Spun along the parade route by neighborhood men, like merry-go-rounds, their top edges fold down to slip under power lines and traffic signals.

Sleepy children, promised candy or other rewards for holding out till the parade ends, march along in their colorful hip-length hapi coats emblazoned with neighborhood insignias. They play tiny drums, or carry the ubiquitous pink, handmade goldfish, that look like a cross between a pinata and kite.

Bringing up the rear of each neighborhood or company group are the flutes and the banks of taiko drums, which can be 8 feet in diameter, pushed along on wheels, while men and women pound upon them with unvarnished wood sticks.

Among the drummers is Reiko Nakahara, a spry 70, the first woman allowed to drum nearly 40 years ago in Hirosaki. “I’m an omatsuri ona-- a festival girl,” Nakahara says. “I tell people if they don’t see me in the group two nights in a row, I’m either sick or dead.”

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A few hours southwest in Akita, there is magic of a different sort. Men hoist bamboo poles strung with horizontal rows of 46, paper-lanterns, each lighted by a candle. Even more than a parade, the festival, known as kanto, is a contest of skill. One man balances a pole--as tall as 50-feet--on his hip, palm, shoulder and even his forehead.

The thousands of lanterns, swaying in the wind, bathe the night sky with soft light, and the city’s major thoroughfare seems transformed into a flotilla of tall ships, their masts alight.

In this northern region of stunningly green rice paddies and apple trees, folklore has it that these festivals also help bring in a good harvest. Each pole in the Akita’s festival is said to represent a stalk of rice; each lantern a grain symbolizing a bale of the Japanese staple.

Today, creating the paper lanterns for the kanto festival provides enough business for four full-time lantern makers to eke out a living in Akita.

Haruo Takahashi gave up being an office worker to make lanterns full-time eight years ago. He affixes thin paper to an accordion-like folding frame as tall as a yard, then paints each neighborhood’s symbol on it.

“He gets good business when it’s windy and rainy, since the lanterns need to be replaced,” says kanto festival president Yuichi Horii, 68. Each costs about $60 to replace. During the festival, the groups will go through at least a full set of 46--more if it rains or is very windy.

The feat of balancing the bamboo poles strung with the rows of lanterns--remarkable even in calm weather--is staggering when it’s windy. Men--and it is only men who are allowed to participate--start drinking protein drinks and lifting weights in late spring when they begin to practice hoisting up poles. At the parade, groups of men chant, “ Do koi sho “--”you can do it,” while a few help raise the poles. But then it is left to one man to carry the pole.

Strung along the sides of the parade route like telephone lines are wires that help block the inevitable crashes of the poles from hitting the crowds, which cheer, roar and scamper out of the way as the poles come smashing down. The candles usually extinguish in the process--and they are relighted and the lantern tree hoisted again.

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Smaller towns in the region still make everything themselves and honor ancient traditions. In Kazuno City, about an hour and a half drive from Aomori, the senior members of each of the 10 participating groups must stop along the parade route at a station staffed by neighborhood elders: They request the right to pass and down a glass of sake at each of 10 stations.

On the final day, they bring their handmade floats to a bridge, and set them afire. This year, the half-moon hanging behind a mountain unveiled itself just before the homemade floats were set afire on a bridge.

The larger festivals have become quite commercial--utility, transportation, trading and fish companies sponsor many groups and neighborhoods. The Aomori floats, for instance, can cost more than $50,000 each. Residents typically chip in $30 to $100 per family. More often than not, the floats are made by professional builders and painters.

Hirosaki builder Hisao Mikuni’s neighborhood committee gets together in late spring to decide its theme and budget. His firm, which makes knives and steel structures for buildings, makes the float’s frame, charging about $13,000 for the job. Why is the festival so important to Hirosaki, a city of 170,000? “It’s always existed,” Mikuni says. “It’s important to pass it on to the next generation.”

Now that he’s getting older, Mikuni only marches in the evening parades. “You’re not only tired, you’re hung-over,” he says. But when he was young, he’d do it every night. “Every day when it got dark,” he says, “my blood would get very excited.”

Adds his colleague Yukiyo Kumatani, 38, “We have such a long winter and feel so isolated by the deep snow, it’s like venting our frustration.”

In Aomori, Hiroo Takenami, 41, who remembers coming to nebuta on his mother’s back when he was 3, now works as a pharmacist several months a year. But from March to August, he designs the three-dimensional floats, getting paid for his professional expertise.

This year, he designed two, including one that featured two warriors doing battle. It was one of the top five floats in the nightly street parade and one of the few to be pulled by tugboat on the bay during the festival’s finale.

That night, tens of thousands gathered on the bay’s edge. Munching on grilled squid and fried soba noodles, they watched as fireworks rained gold streamers down as the bay came alive with the illuminated warrior figures lighting up the night.

After a few hours, the flutes faded and the drumbeat grew more distant as the floats floated away and the festivals came to an end.

“This is a tradition that is very connected with people’s lives,” says designer Takenami, who couldn’t bear to watch as his float, like all the others, was destroyed. But he’s already thinking about ideas for next year.