This week’s festivals are testimony to the boundless imagination of the Japanese for coming up with different ways to enjoy themselves. The primary themes this week were a combination of braving the elements and general goofiness.

An excellent example was the Harukoma Festival in Kawaba-Mura, Gunma Prefecture. Dating from the Meiji period, this festival is said to have originated with traveling minstrels who provided entertainment as an offering for the success of the local silkworm breeding industry. Two groups of four men dress up as women, forming two mother-and-daughter pairs in each group. Starting at dawn, the groups travel to each of the roughly 120 households in the village to sing, dance, and beat on drums with mulberry branches. (Silkworms feed on mulberry leaves.) Because the event takes place in the dead of winter, each household greets the performers with hot food and warm sake. The performers then give each of the households a mulberry branch. It takes until sunset for the groups to make the rounds of all the village houses.

The participants get an earlier start for the Minato Matsuri of Kushimoto, Wakayama Prefecture. Held to pray for a large fish harvest and prosperity in business, the festival begins with several activities. The main event starts later in the afternoon when two teams of 12 men in their 20s strip to the waist, board two boats, and row around the harbor tossing mochi rice cakes to the spectators. They conclude with a race from the harbor to an outlying island and back.

Another wacky festival involving hardy souls ignoring the frigid temperatures is the Water Splashing Festival of Daito, Iwate Prefecture, which was held this year for the 347th straight year. It originated when part of Edo burnt down in 1657, and the date of the fire became inauspicious. Parades and other events are held on the morning of this day. Then at 3:00 p.m., more than 200 men, wearing only straw headbands and white coverlets around their waists, let out a whoop and charge down the city’s main shopping street in sub-zero weather for a 500-meter dash. Crowds lining the streets splash them with purified water they have brought in buckets for the occasion. The festival is held to ward off bad luck and to pray for protection against illness and disaster.

Not all the festivals involved physical hardship, as is seen with the Mosso Matsuri held in Wajima, Ishikawa Prefecture this week. Dating from the Edo period, the festival originated when farmers, straining under an exorbitant annual rice tribute, gathered secretly in a hidden paddy to stuff themselves with the rice they harvested instead of giving it up to the taxman. Every year, the participants eat a bowl of rice about 15 centimeters high that has been formed with a mosso, which is a cylindrical wooden frame.

I suspect the world would be a very different place if the religious faithful conducted rites such as those of the participants in the Waraiko Festival of Hofu, Yamaguchi Prefecture. It is usually performed on December 1, but a special performance was given at the 5th Regional Traditional Arts Festival in Tokyo. Dating from 1199, the event hardly seems like a religious ceremony. The representatives of 21 hereditary families dress in formal attire for a drinking party at the homes of people who have shown them special kindness during the year. Then, holding branches of the sacred sakaki tree, they laugh out loud three times. The first laugh is to give thanks for the harvest, the second is a request for a bountiful harvest next year, and the third is to banish the depressing thoughts of the past year. One of the participants, 72-year-old Hiroshi Uchida, commented that in accordance with the old Japanese proverb that blessings come to those who laugh, they laugh in the festival with the prayer that blessings will come to everyone.

Rather than being conducted by a Shinto shrine, the Shujo Oni festival of Bungotakada, Oita Prefecture, is held in two Buddhist temples. After a religious service, three large torches are lit in the temple. Then, two priests dressed as demons enter. The demons are the embodiment of the Buddha. They perform a dance and engage in other comical activities as they wave the torches in the air, scattering sparks over the onlookers. This festival, which is performed for protection against illness and disaster and to pray for a good harvest, has been conducted continuously since the year 718.