Life In Japan: Festival of the Portable Shrines 2022

It seems like here in Japan we’re always having some holiday or festival. There sure is a lot going on to keep the smiles fresh and the video cameras rolling.

I’ve written before — in fact feature it in LIVE FROM JAPAN! — about the festival we just had this past weekend. This year, it was slightly scaled down from what has been held in the past, presumably because of Covid-19. We don’t really have much of a crisis over the dread bioweapon but Japan plays on the side of cautious.

We spent most of our time on what’s nicknamed “Merchant Street”, a narrow and extremely charming roadway which looks the way it did a century ago, especially since the city last summer buried all of the electrical and communication cabling underground. Wheeled portable shrines (as opposed to ones carried by twenty to thirty inebriated celebrants) paraded up and down the street. In the carriage on top, children played flutes, chimes and various rhythm instruments. Since the vehicles have no steering mechanism — true to a design that must go back a few centuries — they have to be elevated and rotated by hand to change direction.

Rather than try to describe this unorthodox procedure, it’ll be much easier to just show you.

After rolling up and down Merchant Street, the seven or eight wheeled shrines then headed toward the center of town, where they similarly paraded the greater length of our main street. People were in town from all over, both for the festival and to buy soybeans, an item Tambasasayama is famous across Japan for.

One final aside. Because the main street in town still has electrical wires criss-crossing its entire length, there is a tall crown which must be removed from the portable shrines. They are called ‘hoko’ and are displayed in storefronts along the way. They look like the one pictured here.

So that’s it for now . . . until next year!