Kyoto Festival

I had a fabulous time this week going to see Kyoto’s Aoi Matsuri, one of the city’s three big festivals.   It is a huge event for the Japanese, with people coming from all over the country to see the stately parade of horses, floats, and marchers.

Long years ago, in the seventh century, a series of disastrous storms and epidemics raged throughout Japan, ruining the crops and killing many people.  The Emperor Kinmei divined that the Kamo gods were angry, so he sent his messenger to pay homage at their shrines in Kyoto, then Japan’s capital.  The gods were pacified, the storms died down, and the people were happy.  Ever since then, each year the ritual of paying homage to the Kamo gods has continued in what is now the Aoi Matsuri.

Festival day was glorious – sunny, nicely warm, a soft breeze, low humidity.  The parade had actually been postponed a day because of rain, which shows its importance.  Years ago when Kit and I were here, we watched the Festival of the Ages in a heavy October rain.  People flocked to the parade, bought a ticket to get a seat in the viewing stands within the shrines’ grounds, and stopped at a vendor to get something to eat.  They came with cameras ranging from disposables to big SLRs with long lenses and tripods.

The parade was colorful and stately.  The paraders were dressed in 7^th century garb, simple robes in blue, green, a bright orange, and white, wearing hats of varying shapes. Everyone had a big sprig of hollyhock, the symbol of the parade (“Kamoaoi”, the more formal name of the festival, means “hollyhock”).  There were men on horseback, often with a sheaf of arrows or a sword, accompanied by their retinue on foot.  There were also women wearing traditional wigs and an unmarried Kyoto woman, sitting on a float, personifying the shrine’s high priestess.   There were a couple of huge, flower draped wagons pulled by an ox, and several men carrying umbrella-like “floats” with big bouquets of paper flowers atop.  There were no drums or music, and the onlookers watched in silence, cameras clicking. 

Then I got to see a horse race!  After the parade, people streamed forward to the shrine or off to the side.  I went to the side, since I didn’t think I would possibly be able to see anything at the shrine itself.  And that’s where I found people lining up to see the horses run.  This was not like a western horse race, with a dozen or so horses running around a large oval.  This was a long 300-325 meter track down a roped off “alley” in the woods, with people safely well behind the alleyway.  One by one, each horse, with its rider dressed in white, raced down the track past the group of judges.  After the horse was safely away from the end of the track, an older, blue-robed gentleman would stand up at the side of the track and raise a red fan to signal the way was clear for the next rider.  There were five or six riders, and three rounds of the race. 

Again, the crowd was silent, though sometimes there would be an “ooh” as a particularly flamboyant rider passed by with white coat flapping furiously.  They were also taking pictures, though I could never figure out how they would get anything more than a blur of the racing horse.  I slowly realized this was not a race about speed alone; otherwise the horses would race together.  A Japanese woman agreed in halting English:  like all the other traditional arts and activities I had seen, this was about both content and form:  the race was about how well horse and rider rode as one.

After the race, I turned to go back downtown.  I walked by a group of people clustered around a man, all taking pictures.  I looked, and there was a large 3-4” black butterfly on his arm.  Suddenly it flew up and away, then turned and landed on my outstretched arm!  For a few minutes I, too, was the object of the cameras as people snapped away.  One of the onlookers graciously took my camera and took some shots for me so I would have the memory of this beautiful creature.

But that wasn’t the end of my adventures for the day.  As I walked downtown, I picked up some lunch at a convenience store, including an ice cream sandwich, and then walked over to sit in the park next to a river.  I sat on a bench, eating the ice cream sandwich while reading a book on Kyoto.  Out of the blue, I was roughly nudged in the shoulder.  My ice cream sandwich fell to the ground, and then it was gone.  Rising above me was a large brown raven-like bird, joining its colleagues, my sandwich in its claw.  I was amused and amazed – I’d never seen such audacity! 

Afterwards, a young Frenchman came toward me and explained that these birds were quite adept at getting food from unsuspecting picnickers.  It turned out he was studying Zen Buddhism and was staying at a nearby temple for two months.  He was trying to decide whether to stay for a year and go to the Zen monastery if his “sensei” (teacher) recommended it.  It would be a very difficult year, including an arduous rite of passage.  We had a lovely talk, and then I picked up my the rest of my lunch and went under a tree, sitting near someone else, in hopes the ravens would leave me in peace.