Oissa! Oissa! OISSA!

Yesterday morning, Jackie and I awoke at 2:45 am to go to a crazy festival downtown, called "Yamakasa," in the old ward of the city, called Hakata. We'd heard many stories of the glories of Yamakasa, including naked behinds and insanely heavy floats being carried by crowds of grunting men. Having been out late the night before saying goodbye to a fellow teacher, I was in no mood to get up a few short hours later to attend some crazy festival. At Jackie's urging, I went...but this was going to have to be pretty impressive, in order to warrant such an early morning.

Well, it was pretty cool after all. The race commenced at 5 am. There were six teams, each of which carried a float. The floats weigh approximately 1 ton, and they do a time-trial race through the city. Word has it, this festival began in the 13th century, when a local shinto priest had some men build a portable shrine and put him on it, so he could be carried all over town, sprinkling water in order to ward away an impending plague. Legend credits his efforts as a success, so the tradition continues on today as a celebration of the salvation of the city over 700 years ago. They commemorate it with a 5k race through the narrow streets of town, and it has evolved into a fascinating display of "macho-ism," where 6 old neighborhoods of Hakata compete for bragging rights.

Before each float, there first came runners to clear the way. Here is a pic:

They're clearing the way through the crowds, and setting the pace for the guys carrying the float. The streets are really narrow, so when the runners came by, we had to press up pretty close to the fence behind us and try not to get run over. It was pretty intense! It felt a little bit like the running of the bulls in Spain, maybe. All of them were shouting "Oissa! OISSA! Oissa! OISSA!" Nobody's sure what it means, but it supposed to motivate them to keep running. It's nice and rhythmic, anyway. The runners are all men, but also can include some of their sons and we even saw a few daughters, some as old as ten. But the best of all was the toddlers. Everybody wears these g-strings over their bottoms, and some very young runners were still literally in real diapers, so they had a red g-string over their big, white, poofy pampers! It was really cute (though I don't know how they got a toddler to run in an intense 5k race! I think they were carried quite often by a very exhausted father...)

About 30 men carry the float, and a pair of men sit on the float to give direction and cheer the others on. It's extremely heavy, so the men rotate out in a complex system, without ever slowing down. Believe it or not, they managed to move those floats 5k in about 30 mins (some 29 and a few seconds). That's about a 10 minute mile! (for those of us not accustomed to metric) Pretty impressive. But it sure is heavy, as you can see by the expression on that one guy's face. We even saw one guy almost get trampled...the streets are wet because the crowd is constantly throwing water on these guys. This one guy slipped and fell while running, and it took some frantic and dramatic effort by the crowd to get him out of the way, or he would have been squashed like a bug. I think that float has so much momentum, it would be nearly impossible to stop in the case of an accident. Here's a pic of a runner and his grandson after the race.

So, in conclusion, it was definitely worth getting up for. But that being said, I don't believe I'd go again anytime soon. When we arrived back at our apartment around 8:30 am, we fell asleep and didn't wake up until 4:30 pm! Talk about messing up one's sleep schedule. But we got some great video footage, a few pictures, and some fun memories. It was a good experience of traditional Japan.

For a quick explanation of Yamakasa, click the following link:

http://www.bridgewater.edu/~dhuffman/soc306/sp03grp01/page7.html

Also, be sure to see a few pictures I put on Flickr, by clicking on the link to the right.

Oh yeah, and Jackie's board now says "9".

Sayonara.