Every one of the festivals in today’s report was held in northern Kyushu last weekend, the first weekend after summer vacation began for Japanese schools.

Hita Gion Festival

Now designated an important intangible cultural asset by the national government, the Hita Gion Festival (right) in Hita, Oita Prefecture, dates back to 1714 in its present form. The festival is held to pray for protection against illness and disasters caused by the weather. It features a parade of nine elaborate floats whose decorations are based on themes from kabuki stories. These floats are paraded through the town both during the day and at night. They are not merely lifted and taken from one spot to another—the men doing the carrying rotate them and raise them up and down as they proceed. The people of Hita think the hayashi, or musical accompaniment, performed with flutes, taiko drums, and shamisen, is different from others performed in Japan. At the top of the page of this Japanese-language link is WAV file that will give you a sample of the music. You’ll quickly recognize it from the moving musical notes. This link has several photos taken in the daytime at the 1995 festival

Hamasaki Gion Festival

The folks in the Hamasaki district of Karatsu, Saga Prefecture, a coastal town on the Sea of Japan, also have a Gion festival on the same day. Their festival dates from 1753, when a local merchant visited the Gion shrine in Kyoto on business. Passing through Hakata on the way back, he saw the excitement generated by their Gion festival and organized one for Hamasaki. It’s held to pray for protection against illness and for a rich harvest.

There are three floats, built separately and maintained by groups of local fishermen, businessmen, and farmers. Each float is 15 meters high and weighs about five tons, making them among the biggest of any used in Kyushu festivals. The people in Fukuoka reduced the size of their floats with the advent of overhead power lines and stoplights, but in Hamasaki, they’ve decided to keep the height of the floats the same and plan the parade route to avoid any obstacles. It takes 150 men to lug one of these bruisers around town.

The floats are rebuilt every year, and the decorations are based on famous scenes from traditional stories. The Hamasaki festival uses more than 10 hayashi tunes, performed with flutes, taiko drums, bells, and shamisen. There are subtle differences in the tunes played by the musicians on each float, and they change the tune depending on the road conditions. Slower numbers are played when going up hills, and the tempo picks up whenever they round curves.

The highlight comes late at night when the three floats converge on the shrine grounds after their parade through town. The lanterns on the floats are lit and the floats are spun around dozens of times, creating the effect of rings of fire against the backdrop of the night sky. After the festival, the groups responsible for each one completely disassemble them—they will have disappeared by the next morning. Work on the floats for the following year’s festival will begin in six months and finish about two days before the festival starts.

The Omuta Daijayama
Omuta is a former coal-mining town in southern Fukuoka Prefecture, not that far from Karatsu. The festival in its current form is a combination of several local festivals, the oldest of which is the Daijayama Festival thought to have originated sometime between 1640 and 1791. This festival is known for its floats of sea serpents, said to be the symbol of the water god. In later years it was combined with the elements of a Gion festival conducted for the gods of agriculture and as protection against illness.

The big attraction is the sea serpents, however. Each of the six floats is six meters high, 10 meters long, and they require the efforts of 200-300 people to pull through the city. The first part of the festival presents townspeople performing bon odori, the traditional summer festival dances, but the highlight comes after it gets dark. The floats are assembled in one location after their parade through the city. The float carriers start shaking them wildly, and then the serpents’ mouths open to emit multicolored fireworks and smoke. Legend has it that any children bitten by a serpent’s tooth will be guaranteed a healthy, accident-free year.

Years ago, the floats were torn apart at the end of the festival and there was a mad scramble for the serpents’ eyeballs, said to bring good luck. (The Japanese traditionally didn’t mess around during these activities; people used to get killed.) Nowadays, however, a smaller ceremony for getting the eyeballs is held only for children. The floats themselves are still destroyed, and the eyeballs are offered to the divinities at the local shrine. People hang scraps from the destroyed floats on the eaves of their homes to ward off illness and protect the household for the coming year.

The Tobata Gion Festival

The Tobata festival in Kitakyushu, also in Fukuoka Prefecture, dates from 1803. It was held to pray for good health, as a plague struck the area the year before. It has a unique aspect that is shared by few, if any, festivals in Japan.

During the daytime, the four festival floats are paraded around the city decorated with pennants. This is what they look like:

At 7:30 p.m., the floats are returned to a predetermined spot. On a signal, the men responsible for each float swiftly remove the banners and other decorations and strip the floats down to their frames. After columns and crossbars are installed, the floats are decorated with 12 rows of 309 lanterns to form a pyramid. The entire process takes only about 20 minutes from start to finish. The parade starts again, this time with the floats being carried by 50 or 60 men each, accompanied by the hayashi festival music and shouts of “Yoitosa, yoitosa!”

And here’s what the floats look like then:

A bee farmer in Taiwan smiles for the camera recently as approximately 500,000 bees crawl all over him.

According to Taipei Times photographer Chen Mei-nien, the farmer first placed 12 queen bees on his body to attract the others.

Japan’s Star Festival (Tanabata) falls on July 7 every year, following the modern Western solar calendar, but the real date is the seventh day of the seventh month on the ancient Chinese lunar calendar.

Interestingly, in Taiwan, Tanabata (sometimes called “Chinese Valentine’s Day” on the island) is celebrated using the lunar calendar, and this year it will be August 11.

To mark Taiwan version of Tanabata, the Tainan International Chihsi Art Festival will be held from August 6-11, giving tourists an opportunity to experience authentic and traditional Taiwanese customs.

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One of qualities I most admire about the Japanese is their ability to turn everyday activities into an art form or an opportunity for aesthetic appreciation: drinking tea, arranging rocks and gravel in a garden, arranging flowers in a vase, watching carp or goldfish, enjoying cherry or plum trees in bloom…

Painting landscapes on the walls of bathhouses…

This excellent article in the English-language edition of the Daily Yomiuri last week presents the art of penki-e (literally, industrial paint picture) and reports that it is on the verge of disappearing due to the declining number of sento (public baths), especially in Tokyo.

If you think painting a picture on a bathhouse wall is no big deal, you might want to reconsider:

What makes the penki-e painting method stand out from other painting methods is that the artists have to work under severe conditions. They start work early in the morning and have to finish before the bathhouse opens, usually at 5 p.m. So the painter only has about eight hours to complete a large painting, usually about 13 meters wide. Not only do the painters have to work fast, they also have to work in extremely hot and humid conditions.

“It looks easy, but you need special techniques to do penki-e,” Maruyama explained. “First of all, fabric is laminated onto the wall where the mural is to be painted. Then we smooth the surface with glue, and seal the undercoating and paint over it. Finally we paint a picture, and dry it.”

Most of the time is spent preparing the area and drying the painting. Only two or three hours are actually spent painting.

“This is one of the terrific things about penki-e painting,” emphasized Shinobu Machida, a researcher of popular culture and pioneer of sento research. “No other art can create such a big picture in such a short time.”

A pioneer in sento research? Come to think of it, another fascinating aspect of Japan is the number of experts on topics that at first glance don’t seem to be worth examining in detail.

Once again, it’s time to reconsider:

Machida stresses that penki-e is important in terms of art history.

“It adopted Western techniques, which were introduced in the late Edo period. It used light and shade to give contrast,” he said.

The technique is called shadow method, which the versatile and multitalented Hiraga Gennai (1728-1779) introduced into Japan. Shadow method gives the painting various shades of color and makes it three dimensional, in contrast to the traditional Japanese method in which the painter drew an outline and then filled it in with color.

“Before that [shadow method], pictures were flat. The technique was necessary because people viewed the painting through the steam of the bathtub. It needed to look rough up close, but clear from a distance,” Machida explained.

As with many other arts and disciplines in Japan, you just don’t decide you want to be a penki-e artist and then start splashing on the paint. Kiyoto Maruyama, the artist interviewed for the article, first served as an apprentice to his uncle, another bathhouse artist.

“During the first three years, apprentices are allowed to paint only the sky blue. Many of them quit at this point. Apprentices watch the process of painting and learn from the master. Then, they are allowed to paint sides, clouds and, eventually, the whole picture. Usually, it takes six years to get to that point.”

Sounds like the same process and roughly the same amount of time it takes to become an itamae, or sushi chef.

I’m a big fan of bathhouses, but I’ve never been to one that has a penki-e. I like the outdoor baths with their natural views the best. But if you live in a city like Tokyo, this seems to be the next best thing–unless it’s a mixed bath!

UPDATE
After spending some time scouting around the web, I found these Japanese-language sites worth visiting for the photos.

The first one, here, has several fine examples of penki-e. I think it may be the site of the Shinobu Machida mentioned in the article, though I couldn’t confirm it.

The second site, here, has a series of 22 photographs showing the process of creating one painting from start to finish.

The third site has a larger photo of a wall being painted, with many smaller ones of the process.

My favorite sake maven, John Gaunter, knows just about everything anyone anywhere could ever know about sake. And by the way, it’s spelled sake, not saki. How to pronounce it in Japanese? Ask a native speaker.

I love the stuff, nigorizake, that is, and can never get enough of it. I know, I know, it’s dangerous, but life is dangerous!

Listen to what Mr. Gaunter has to say about White Sake in one of his published articles, this one from the Japan Times a few years ago:

“It is all too easy to get all too serious about sake all too often. Ginjo this and ginjo that, highly polished rice, double-secret yeast, fancy fragrance, full palate, clean finish, yada yada yada. Sake in the end should be fun, and nothing reminds us of this better than nigorizake.

We’ve all seen it, the white, opaque sake, found occasionally on shelves around the country. Just what is it, what does it taste like, and how does it differ from regular sake?

Nigorizake is — just as the name implies — cloudy sake. The “cloudiness” is nothing more than part of the fermenting mash, unfermented rice solids left suspended in the sake.”

If you want to learn more, Gautner runs an online sake newsletter here.

A self-proclaimed rightist was arrested in Hiroshima for vandalizing the main atomic bomb memorial there.

Takeo Shimazu used a hammer and two chisels to cut out a hole in the granite memorial to eliminate the word “mistake” from the text, “Let all the souls here rest in peace as we will never repeat this mistake.” When the memorial was dedicated in 1952, then mayor Shinzo Hamai declared that “mistake” is in reference to Japanese miliarism.

“Why should the Japanese apologize in a monument they built? It is the Americans who committed a mistake,” he was quoted as saying by the police.

The memorial has been monitored by a surveillance camera since another vandal defaced it with paint in 2002.

A night of “sake bombing” in New York guarantees a ritualistic drinking marathon, perfect for large groups, or dates that will end shamefully sometime the next morning. Of course, it’s critical your go-to spot has low prices, above-average sushi and almost limitless free-flowing sake.

Here’s two hot spots. . .

A place called “Cube 63″ (telephone owners Ken and Ben at 212.228.6751) at 63 Clinton Street in Manhattan is a raucous, shoebox-sized, Lower East Side BYO where they’ll laugh in your face if you arrive with less than 2 magnums of sake and a case of Sapporo beer. Here, you can bomb carelessly and wildly without having to worry about scrubbing toilets to pay off your bill. The super-fresh sushi is amazing, and so reasonably priced you’ll shell out less than US$50 for the fish, the booze, and the resulting drunken fisticuffs you’ll have with your date over the last Volcano Roll.

Or try “Azuki Sushi” at 239 Park Avenue South (telephone them at 212.228.3611), just three doors down from “Sushi Samba” but one-third the price. If you order dinner, the sake’s all-you-can-drink, and free. No idea how they can afford this magnanimity, but they do. New York, New York!