Crap. I'm like, 18 days behind. It's ok. I took notes. If I can just catch up to the point where The Pred leaves, we'll have more freedom to jump around without making it confusing.
So, matsuri means “festival,” and from what I understand, seasons, foods, historical dates, and even the fact that you all live in a certain neighborhood, are all reasons enough to have a matsuri. I've officially been to a few already, but the first was while The Pred and husband were still here and if you’ve seen my picture with Colonel Sanders in matsuri garb outside the KFC, that was the one he was celebrating :) We went out and bought me a lovely pink and white yukata. Unfortunately the cute little geta shoes didn’t fit but it was all right because all the other girls wearing geta and me not wearing geta leveled the playing field a little. Also, I bought a pre-packed deal which meant: clip-on obi-bow! No tying required! Lol It’s great, because the only way you can tell is by looking at how crisp the bow is, then looking at me, and knowing there’s no way I could have tied it myself.
I wasn’t sure about it at first. I desperately wanted to be dressed up, but I didn’t want to look like a poser. The Pred said she’d done it before, our neighbor had just bought a wonderful new yukata for her husband so he had to do it, and she was so adamant that I do it...so we all did. Unfortunately, she didn’t know how to do it, and our neighbor was busy taking her daughter to piano lessons so we had to get dressed alone. Technically I don’t think you need to wear special things under yukata if you tie them right, but we both wore tank tops and running shorts just in case (and I’m glad we did). You see, it’s difficult to keep things in order when 1) you’re not used moving in it, 2) you’re a little big for it, and 3) it wasn’t put on properly. Yukata, at least in this price bracket, tend to be one-size fits all. Fortunately enough of it is supposed to be folded normally, so if I just kind of curl the fabric where it should be folded, it falls about at the length it’s supposed to even on my tremendously long foreign body. It even fit me pretty flatteringly, for having almost as un-Japanese of a body as you can get. I *almost* went the whole nine yards and plucked an acrylic flower bow from our curtains. It would have been adorable, but perhaps a bit bold. I wasn’t aiming to earn any sort of medal for standing out. We snapped some pictures, me fresh with my Japanese haircut, and off we went. It was stressful not wanting to rumple myself, but I move carefully, so I could have gotten used to it if it had been tied up by a little old lady.
There were many matsuri in the neighborhoods we passed (summer is like that), but on our way to the shrine where the matsuri was held, there was literally no one in yukata. Our own neighborhood had one too, but it was two nights long so we decided to spend the first night at the shrine. As we approached, there were a lot of stares. Mostly it was women adoring us - I think going for the pink and white girlish yukata was a good choice. I heard many of them yell “kawaii!!!” as I walked by.
The characteristically long approach from the torii gate to the temple was lined with vendors of toys and food, and quickly we were shoulder to shoulder in a sea of people. For those of you wondering, I did not play the classic goldfish game, for fear of rumpling my yukata.
This was also the first night I’d gotten a decent sampling of people, so I was surprised to see how many tall people are actually in Japan. I’d say maybe 1 in 5 young men are much taller than me. I’ve seen a few women about my height as well, maybe one every three days, and in a month I've seen maybe 2 women taller than me. From what I’ve heard, “the youth are getting taller.”
At the temple, many more people were in yukata, and while I still felt like I stuck out a little, it was great fun. I bowed, clapped, prayed, and bowed again at the main house of the shrine while tossing some yen inside (Gotta call the spirits attention, y’know? Supposedly the clapping is the same sound as the sound that divided chaos into heaven and earth and gave birth to Japan, according to the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki). I think my wish is the 2nd most common wish in all Japan. The Pred wanted to enter the karaoke contest, but it was full up with old ladies. We went to see what kinds of charms the temple was selling, and as it turned out a young woman whose family owned the temple had been one of The Pred’s students. She was wearing the priestess outfit, which was absolutely adorable and cool with it’s huge red dress-like pants and crisply folded white wrap shirt. We went inside to look at more things and her mother, one with much traditional dressing experience given her line of work, noted that me and The Pred had our yukata folded over the wrong way.
The Pred quibbled about it a bit and was content to leave it until I told her that if you fold it right over left, that’s how they fold kimono on dead people ;x I can’t believe I forgot! This is something I knew! I knew it from culture classes and I knew it from karate, too! There’s really no excuse for my blunder other than, “In the west, that’s how women’s jackets go.” The Pred’s husband’s was fine, of course, because his U.S. buttons go the living way ;_; So we ran off to the bathroom. I managed to switch mine without taking off my obi (not a clean job but it worked) and The Pred was completely disheveled until we nabbed a woman to help set her back up again. Four foot tall old ladies were passing beneath her armpits in the over-crowded 2 foot wide bathroom as the custodian for the temple wrapped her in a bear-hug and dressed her. I don’t think anyone else had really noticed before we fixed them, fortunately.
When we rejoined the throngs, kids were on shoulders of their parents wearing light-up cat ears, and people from the neighborhood and from the school surrounded us. In fact, even the woman who’d cut my hair the day before was there and she grabbed me in the crowd excitedly. Fortunately, I remembered who she was after a few seconds. She introduced me to her kids, I told her I liked the cut, and she told me to please come back again. I probably will, but next time we’ll leave the crazy scissors out.
It was a majestic scene, the shrine matsuri, but of course the pictures didn’t turn out well, so you’ll have to use your imagination. I ate okonomiyaki (lit: whatever-you-like-grilled), and from what I’m told it wasn’t very good as far as okonomiyaki goes, but I thought it was the best thing I’ve eaten here yet: Hot jumbles of noodles and cabbage and mayo and sauce and various other goodnesses! Other things consumed by me were: yakisoba (grilled soba noodles with soy sauce and vegetables), konnyaku and fish kebabs (konjak gelatin and fish marinated in sweet sauce), and a candy coated umeboshi (pickled sour plum, which in my opinion are only edible coated in sugar, though they’re quite popular straight-up).
The okonomiyaki vender was my favorite though, he was a toothless old man who was screaming everything he had to say, including when he yelled at us, “Don’t burn yourself. You know this Japanese word, right? ‘Burn?’ Do you understand me? You eat this now and you’ll end up with a mouth like mine! Hahahahhaha!!”
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