Going Loco in Kokawa

Bringing things full circle, pretty much a year to the day I first started this ‘ere journal, I’m writing once again about the goings on at Kokawa Town’s annual summer festival. Yesterday evening the great and the good were out in full force to mingle, eat, drink, be merry and to watch the pushing and pulling of the traditional carnival floats known as danjiri.

Huge, bedecked with lanterns and often containing large numbers of children with a taiko drummer or two thrown in for good measure, these oversized wooden death traps are raced along the town’s narrow streets without much warning – several men will suddenly run towards you blowing whistles and gesticulating wildly, which is your cue to get the hell out the way and watch as the danjiri lumbers past, accompanied by shouts of what sounds like san-ri-yo – no relation to the manufacturers of Hello Kitty merchandise, I’m sure…

The Kinokawa/Wakayama Shi massive was out in full force of course, with numbers swelled even larger than usual with the addition of Gemma’s brother Robert, Hannah’s boyfriend Jan and two high school buddies of Jared’s. Not only were we numerous, we were nearly all dressed for the occasion, with yukattas for the girls and jimbes for the guys. Alas, I have no pictures at all of our sartorial hi-jinks, but Mercedes is likely to post plenty over on her blog some time in the next few days.

As one might imagine on a night involving a large group of people attending a crowded festival and drinking rather a lot in the process, it wasn’t long before the group fragmented and the night became increasingly random and chaotic.

Having taken a stroll up to Kokawa Temple (with all the assembled people there loudly praying and the myriad food and trinket stalls, it was by far the rowdiest temple I’d ever seen) myself, Noel and Sean took a leisurely stroll back along the main street where all the action was, stopping every now and then to say hello to students we recognised from our classes and marvel at the lithe young girls whose job it was to hang off the danjiris and give a hand pushing them. We then had the good fortune to run into a colleague of Sean’s, who invited us back to the shop owned by his family, where we were treated to lashings of sushi and draught lager and partook in animated conversation spanning arcane Japanese popular culture and obscure kanji characters.

Following this, we managed to reconvene with some of our lot from earlier, looking slightly the worse for wear. Thoroughly smashed by this point, several of us struck up conversation with some of the aforementioned lithe young girls loitering beside an idle danjiri, who’d taken the unusual step of accessorising their traditional uniforms with Jamaican scarves and face paint because they ‘liked reggae music very much’. Much stilted banter later, I was extremely excited by their suggestion that some of us drunken gaijin assist them with the pulling of their mighty danjiri. After a couple of beers beside the temple, the call came for Robert to join them, and not wanting to be left out (and drunk enough to care who knew) I ended up foisting myself into the crowd.

To the cries of san-ri-yo Rob and myself did a fairly cack-handed job of helping a dozen or so people push the thing down the street at steadily increasing speed until we slowly ground to a halt a hundred and fifty meters or so later. There then followed a lengthy san-ri-yo call-and-response session between the danjiri’s female passengers and their largely male mules, during which Robert and I were finally rumbled. A short, bespectacled and extremely agitated man pointed at us, demanding that we leave, ostensibly because we both had incorrect footwear (sandals and flip-flops, as opposed to the Japanese wooden sandals which are all but impossible to run in) but the racial subtext was impossible to ignore. (though of course, he could have just been pissed off that two drunk, British idiots were lowering the tone). As I remarked to Robert on our way back to the temple to rejoin the others, what we’d just experience had been the very best and very worst that Japanese hospitality had to offer.

Feeling somewhat ill after the danjiri dash, it was clear the night was finally starting to catch up with me. Accompanying the others to the 24 hour supermarket to pick up some late night munchies was about all I was good for by that point, and abandoning my original plan to walk back to Sarah’s, I instead opted to crash on the floor at Hannah’s.

So, here I am, feeling slightly tender but otherwise good and finding it a little difficult to believe that the sun is finally setting on my two-year-long Japanese adventure. This is the last time I shall be posting from the land of the foreign sun, my final postscript will be from England’s green (well, rather barren and parched if news about the weather is to be believed) and pleasant shores. Due to me having passed out by the time the others briefly returned to Hannah’s later that night, I’m slightly upset to have missed saying goodbye to Gemma, Sean and Noel for the final time, so I’ll do it here – take it easy guys, thanks for some pretty damn good times and stay in touch.

All that’s left for me now is perhaps one final okonomiyaki in a nice little restaurant here in Naga, and then a long flight home tomorrow morning. Here’s to hoping my excess baggage costs don’t bankrupt me and that I make it back in one piece.

Nihon…sayonara…