Vince wasn't quite sure who had invited him to join the Ikebe-cho Omikoshi Matsuri. Certainly, he was later to realise that it was no coincidence that Osamu had taken him to the Yokohama Budokan on the morning before he was to joust with the portable shrine. The Budokan was on the very edge of Kishine Park and was the local martial arts centre and had sections for Kyudo (archery), Judo, Aikido, Karate and Kendo (bamboo sword fencing).
It occurred to Vince only later that Osamu was actually steeling him for things to come and, in comparison to the real battle later in the day, the judo, kyudo and kendo were decidedly lacklustre. He was fed three large bowls of oden, one of Vince's favourite dishes, and then ordered to go to the toilet, because there was no way to do it while wearing his omikoshi costume.
The costume itself had already caused more than its share of concerns. They had ordered the double large size and it seemed as if it were still going to be too small for Vince even then. As it was, it just fitted if Vince held his breath. It had also been unfortunate that Osamu had asked Vince if he would be involved in the festival over the phone and in English. Osamu had been taking lessons. Vince had told him, "I'd be delighted to, Osamu-san, but I don't have a happi coat." "Nani?" "I have no happi." "You no happy?" "No, I'm happy. I just have no happi." "You don't want to festival?" "No, I just have no happi. I don't have a happi. I am happi-less." "Happiness? Nani?" "Happi ja nai!" "Nani?" "Happi ga arimasen!" Once, the problem had been sorted out, Osamu had gone out and bought the full festival costume right down to the undergarments. Vince stripped down to his underwear just in time for the entire neighbourhood to arrive, so that they could watch. What better entertainment than a strip show followed by a torture scene? First came the haramaki, it was five metres long and was wrapped around Vince's abdominal region some six times from bottom to top with both Osamu and Nozomi pulling at it at times and imploring him to hold his breath. Nozomi informed Vince that the haramaki was also traditionally tightly wrapped around the stomachs of pregnant women. She had evidently shocked her mother by refusing to wear one while carrying her own two children on the grounds that it was uncomfortable for the fotus and caused varicose veins. As she explained this last part, she gave the haramaki one almighty tug that made Vince gasp and he looked desperately at his own still naked legs expecting to see varicose veins pop to the surface.
The haramaki safely tucked in upon itself, Vince's stomach bulged up in to his chest and down into his thighs, making him look as if he had taken a Charles Atlas body building course. Nozomi was already running the pants up his legs and they were tight around his thighs. They were split both up the back and the front - yet another example of Japanese forethought, they had been pre-split so that he wouldn't split them while he was carrying the omikoshi. Nozomi tied them with draw strings along one hip and to Vince's infinite surprise they looked quite respectable after all.
Next came the hadagi under coat, which was white with short sleeves. It was tied with a yellow strip of folded cloth, some two metres long, which Osamu insisted had to go around Vince's body twice. He puffed and huffed and ordered Vince to let out some more breath. He even threatened to unwrap Vince, haramaki and all, and redo him up twice as tightly. Vince only got his reprieve when Osamu tried to put on his own yellow belt and discovered that he couldn't get it around his own potless tummy twice either.
Nozomi, in the meantime, was attaching his tabi, stiff cotton boots that seemed more like socks than shoes. They had thin plastic soles with tread on the bottoms. They connected at the back above the heel with spring steel clips and were split between the big toe and the other toes. The final touches were the happi coat with the kanji character for matsuri (festival) on the back plus circles and twirls and the pink sweat band for around the forehead. The coat was tied with yet another sash with a chain pattern on it and that was exactly how Vince felt, chained in.
Feeling dressed to kill, Vince was led to Osamu's waiting van and taken to the Ikebe shrine which was buzzing with local enterprise - choc bananas, okonomiyaki, grilled squid on sticks, lemonade vendors and fairy floss machines. Little kids were fishing for plastic balls and gold fish with tissue paper nets, mothers were chatting gaily, shopkeepers had moved their wares out onto the roadway, and the whole street came to a standstill, gasping at the sight of Vince in his full festival vestments "Suteki ne!" He was led, pushed, pulled, shoved, stampeded in the direction of the omikoshi which was sitting on some trestles at the foot of the shrine. Three old men, presumably elders of the community, sat in an open fronted building off to one side of the otorii gate, ink brushes poised as if they were about to record the scores of the prospective omikoshi-san.
The omikoshi was dominated by red, gold and black. The roof was a shiny black with a gold seal on each of the four sides. Right at the top, there was a golden ho or Chinese phoenix made from beaten brass. Underneath the roof the interior was largely red and there was a little otorii gate on each of its four sides. The portable shrine was supported on two beams on either side, but to make it more manageable, the men of Ikebe-cho had tied two other poles crosswise.
Vince looked at the 350 kilogram omikoshi portable shrine and wondered if he would have to carry it all by himself. It wasn't the first time that he had found himself the lone foreigner in the group, hundreds of Japanese and here was Vince, tubby and balding, representing the rest of the world. He hadn't really considered that carrying an omikoshi could be much more than mildly strenuous. He had seen them in parades before, 80 odd people jogging along chanting, falling in and out of the company, occasionally pitching the portable shrine backwards and forwards.
Within 30 seconds of lifting up the omikoshi from the trestles, he realised that what he had seen was classical omikoshi-toting and that what he was experiencing now was the art in its free form. The shrine swung around in great arcs, pitched and yawed, rolling this way and that. Vince in the middle of it all felt the shrine pound up and down on his collar bone until he thought it was going to break. His feet stumbled this way and that, trampled by other feet, his toes cracking on old broken lines of concrete in the temple grounds, the soft plastic soles of his tabi victim to any stones that happened to find their way under them.
Shrine maidens, carrying staffs with bold iron rings at the top, looked bored by the proceedings. They seemed to be either 12 or 55 years old and nowhere in between and they each had long hair tied right in the centre of the tops of their heads by a cane coronet. Their job, Osamu assured Vince, was to bring in the good spirits. On the other hand, a man waved a leafy branch of bamboo over the omikoshi, evidently to drive away the evil spirits. As if worried about the apparent boredom level of the shrine maidens, he would start to chant: "Up, up, up. Higher, higher, higher." The men would oblige by lifting the omikoshi high over their heads and then would throw it into the air and catch it several times Vince had never seen anything like this before. He watched from below as the portable shrine soared high above their heads and came hurtling down again. Somehow, they always caught it. Vince had a pang of fear that one time, they'd throw it into the air and when it came down he would be the only one underneath it. He could already hear the conversation as they carried him away in the ambulance.
"What happened?" "Wouldn't you know it, the stupid gaijin dropped the thing, didn't he?" Through all the whirling of the crowd around him, the only people who seemed to be in focus were the shrine maidens who still looked bored. The other men must have noticed it too, for they charged across the compound to storm the gate. There were men blowing whistles on either side to tell them when they were getting too close to the crowds around them. Vince noticed fairly early on that Osamu spent more time blowing a whistle than toting the omikoshi.
This time, the omikoshi-san were intent on storming the gate and taking the portable shrine out of the shrine premises and into the street. The entire local volunteer fire brigade was out in force to ensure that this didn't happen, but the stampede across the compound seemed unstoppable. Vince saw the look of real fear on the faces of the mothers and children alike standing under the otorii. Pushed forward by the crowd, they could see no direction of escape.
Suddenly, Vince tripped. He groped in the air and caught one of the supports which he gripped as if his life depended on it as no doubt it did. At first, he swung freely from it and then he was dragged along the ground. When he finally regained his feet, the firemen were forcing the omikoshi back into the centre of the grounds and they were all soon throwing it in the air again. Vince had been out of breath a number of times since they had started 25 minutes before, but now he was exhausted. "What was that all about?" he asked Nozomi between gulps of air.
"What was what all about?" "All that business down by the otorii." "Oh," Nozomi laughed, "nostalgia!" "Nostalgia?" "They once used to carry the omikoshi around all the streets in the district." "Why don't they do that, now?" "The streets are too narrow and there's too much traffic. And besides, these are country boys. I bet you've never seen anyone throwing an omikoshi in the air before. When they used to take it around the streets, it would end up just about anywhere - in the rice paddies, in creeks, through the fronts of houses or shop windows." "They seemed pretty serious about getting it into the streets before." Nozomi laughed again, "I think it's all bluff myself, but it makes for a good show." "Why don't you have a go, Nozomi?" Vince asked suddenly.
"No, this festival is only for men." ce "But other omikoshi are carried by men or women. I've seen them at Asakusa." "Yes, that's true, but this is Ikebe-cho." "It seems unfair." Nozomi thought for a minute and then said, "Maybe, Ikebe will buy an omikoshi for the women one day, too." Between omikoshi totings, a group of four men showed off their strength with 15 foot high hanakago - bamboo sticks with red paper flowers attached to the poles and a basket arrangement on top. Each twirled his hanakago in time with the others, first in a clockwise direction and then in a counterclockwise direction. Osamu came over to explain.
"We have this every five or six years." "Why?" "Because the festival only happens on a Sunday once every five or six years." Vince was soon to discover that one of the hazards of being the only person representing the rest of the world in an omikoshi festival was that you had to be involved all the time. The next time the omikoshi was hoisted, he noticed that a lot of the men with whom he'd jostled before, went to sit down and others replaced them. Osamu picked up his whistle again and Vince found himself once more in the middle of the throng.
He had learned some lessons from his first experience and determined not to get too close to the omikoshi. This really didn't work either as the taller men were on the outside while the shorter men were on the inside, some even right under the omikoshi itself. By the time he was carrying the portable shrine for the third time, he began to recognise familiar faces, men who like himself had been there for the last three performances and a certain camaraderie began to develop.
If Vince was in a daze after his third stint with the shiny black omikoshi, Connie had decided that he'd definitely had quite enough. She steered him through the stalls and back to the van. Once, they arrived back at the Atsukawa's, he went for a shower, surveyed the bruises on his shoulders and feet and anticipated the aches and pains his long neglected muscles would give him over the following week. He frowned at himself in the mirror and suddenly saw that Connie was watching him from behind.
"Are you okay?" she whispered.
"Of course," he replied with some last vain attempt at bravado. "Just fine." "Was it alright?" "Yeah, it was great." "Great?" Connie laughed. "Vince, you look almost dead." "Yeah, great," he thought. "Great footy practice." ad.
Vince hadn't toted the Ikebe-cho omikoshi for an hour plus without wanting to see how they were made. He visited Yokohama's only remaining omikoshiya, Mikoshi Dashi Giyomatsuri, headed by its own elder craftsman, Kenji Ishibashi. He had a single apprentice, who had been working on portable shrines for only five years and was therefore only a quarter of the way through his apprenticeship.
Unfortunately, Vince and Connie visited the omikoshiya in September, which, just after the summer festival season, was the slow time for a portable shrine maker. Indeed, they were just about to start for the next season, almost a year away. Mr. Ishibashi proudly displayed one of the beaten brass phoenices that would eventually stand at the very top of a portable shrine.
"We usually make eight omikoshi in a year," he explained, running his fingers up and down the wings of the phoenix. "And that includes repair jobs." "Eight in a year," Connie hissed in Vince's ear, "This surely can't be the only omikoshiya in town." "We make omikoshi," Mr. Ishibashi continued, "for shrines all over the country. Aomori down to Okinawa." "Come on," Connie persisted, "there are thousands of these around the country. How come there are so few people who make them?" "The biggest one we've made," Mr. Ishibashi explained, "was in Showa 9 (1934). My father made that one and the ho alone weighed 80 kilograms. It's so heavy that it has to be carried on a truck. They brought it in for repairs seven years ago. It was such a big job that it took the entire year." "See what I mean?" Connie whispered.
"Of course, omikoshi are expensive," the old man elaborated. "Even a relatively small one, say 25 inches high, costs 150 man-en." "That's about $170,000 Australian," Vince informed Connie.
Mr. Ishibashi was busy by this stage beating out some pieces of brass for the corners of the portable shrine. He sat with his buttocks on his heels amid grinding machines and odd-shaped anvils working the metals with a hammer and a punch, stopping at intervals to illustrate how the metal was marked and bent. Vince looked around the walls which had dozens of certificates from satisfied customers.
Once, Mr. Ishibashi had finished his panel beating, he crudely assembled a portable shrine, the wood unpainted, to show how the whole business went together. Mrs. Ishibashi brought out some cans, soft drinks or cold oolon cha. And Vince supped quietly while Connie besieged the artisan with questions.
"How did he make the wood fittings?" "They are made at a local carpenter's shop nearby. They are made from zelkova, the same wood that is used to make the kine hammer and usu bowl for omochi rice pounding." Connie shot Vince a triumphant glance, "And what about the metal attachments that aren't made from brass?" "They are cast metal from a factory in Tokyo," Mr. Ishibashi admitted.
Connie could hardly restrain herself, "Only omikoshiya in Yokohama. All he makes is the little brass pieces on the sides and the phoenix on the top." "He also assembles it, paints it and puts on the finishing touches." "But most of it is made by some carpenter down the road who doesn't get any certificates of gratification from satisfied Shinto priests." "For goodness sake," Vince snapped, as only one who has carried an omikoshi can to one who has no intention of ever carrying one. "What sort of car did we drive in Australia?" "A Toyota!" "And Toyota doesn't commission contractors to supply different parts of their cars. They don't send them over in bits, so that they can be assembled in Australia." "I suppose they do." "Is that so different from what Mr. Ishibashi does?" Connie could suddenly see herself getting embroiled in another debate about namebrands and relented, "I suppose not."