roganjosh

So, in my rush to describe the madness of the Hadaka Matsuri I missed out a couple of stops I made on the way. After Hiroshima I spent two nights on the island Shikoku, firstly in Matsuyama and secondly in Takamatsu. Matsuyama is apparently famous for being mentioned in a book about turn of the century Japan called Botchan, and according to the tourist information the city is attempting to be a living museum to the age in which the story is set. This involves having trams that look like steam trains, restoring lots of historic buildings and making a big deal about Dogo Onsen - the oldest onsen in Japan. A nice little city to visit, but I think that having people standing around in period costumes so you can have your picture taken with them is taking things a bit far. Cool trains though, and the Dogo brewery beer is excellent!

On the way from Matsuyama to Takamatsu I decided to hope off the train in Saijo, home of the Asahi brewery in the area. My guidebook had told me you needed to phone in advance for the tour, but since I was only planning on stopping at the beer garden for lunch I didn’t bother. Arriving at the train station though I realised that Saijo isn’t much of a tourist destination - no tourist information, no signs in English, nothing that hinted at how to find the brewery. I was feeling a bit stumped until an Asahi logo-ed minibus showed up and the driver and I had a very tortured conversation in Japanese. The upshot was that he phoned the brewery to book me in for the tour, but I was told that there were no English guides available. I figured following a Japanese tour group around would be okay so long as I made it to the beer tasting at the end, so I went along with the plan and the minibus took me to the brewery where I signed in. By not phoning ahead I had obviously upset the system a little, but when I arrived I was told that one of the receptionists was going to show me the brewery, and so I got my own personal tour! Unfortunately all the machinery was closed for cleaning that day, so there wasn’t much to see, but once I got to the otherwise empty beer tasting room there was a little table set up with my name and a union jack on it! I got to try three of the different Asahi beers and was even giving some snacks to nibble on. All this for the grand total of - nothing! They didn’t charge me a penny! Needless to say I’ve been drinking as much Asahi as possible to recompense them.

Takamatsu was a fairly unpromising city. The only accomodation I could get was a business hotel near the railway line. I nearly left the city straight away the next morning to get to Okayama early, but train schedules were a bit erratic. Just as well they were though because I would have missed out on visiting Ritsurin Park if I had skipped out early. Apparently Ritsurin Park isn’t one of “top three” Japanese gardens but if that’s the case then the others must be very, very good! Japanese gardens are designed to reveal different views as you walk around them and Risturin is full of lakes, herons, red bridges, pine trees, plum trees - pretty much every view of japan that’s ever been painted onto a plate can be found around some corner or other. Nice way to spend a sunny morning, before it starts to snow on the way back to the train.

Okayama was the naked man festival, but also a city with another nice castle and a pleasant place to stay. After Okayama I managed a lunctime stop over in Himeji to see Japan’s most famous castle, but I’d reached castle overload at that point and wasn’t too impressed, and then carried on to Kyoto! Didn’t actually get up to much in Kyoto, but it’s a nice city to just hang around and watch the world go round. I’d seen most of the touristy things last time I was in the city but going to the Fushimi Inari Shrine was really good - thousands of torri gates covering paths leading up into the hills. I didn’t know about the hill at the time, but it was a really cool place to walk around, and I’m sure my legs will recover at some point!

 And now here I am in Tokyo again! I’ll let you know what fun things I find…

Last night I went to Saidaiji-eyo, an ancient Japanese holy tradition that is also known as Hadaka Matsuri, or more recently - the naked man festival. Thousands of men wearing loincloths descend on the Saidaiji temple for a purification ceremony/contest that involves them wading into the freezing water of a temple pool near the river, then praying at the shrine before marching around the temple, under some ropes and then back into the water to repeat the praying and marching one more time. Once this has been completed the men start to gather in groups on the front of the temple waiting for midnight, when the lights are turned out and the priests throw shinji sticks into the crowd. The men who manage to grab the sticks and make it out of the temple are said to be guaranteed good fortune for the coming year. Over the years the competition has become quite organised, with groups of men developing strategies on how best to make sure that one of their number is the man; so that as you watch the writhing mass of bodies that are pressing themselves up the temple steps and into the main part of the building it starts to look like some weird combination of sumo and american football, only played by hundreds of teams on a pitch about the size of a tennis court.

The first groups of men were starting the washing and marching when I turned up at about 9pm, but it wasn’t until about 11:00 that people started to mass on the temple and then there was still an hour of waiting while the build up commenced. As more and more bodies threw themselves in the crowd would bulge, and teeter on the edge of falling down the steps. People would faint, and the massed ranks of the security teams would surge into the crowds leaving a corridor of guards to pull the unfortunate to safety. Some of the competitors were so drunk that their friends were having to hold them up, despite the warnings being given out in English about how no naked men were allowed to take part who were under the influence of liqour. Although most people were wearing white loincloths there were a few people to be spotted wearing black ones, and the considered opinion of people in the crowd seemed to be that they were yakuza! This was serious stuff, and dangerous at that. Quite a few drunken gaijin (foreigners) were joining in as the night progressed, but this was not a Japanese tradition I’d want to be a part of - and I very much doubt that my insurance covers me for acts of lunacy!

So the crowd gathered, and security dived in every once in a while, and the spectators stood in their spots for hours waiting until finally it was midnight - the lights went out and the naked men roared as the sticks were thrown in, and then… well, I have no idea! The sticks seemed to leave the temple pretty quickly, and bubbles of activity spilled out of the temple with them as teams protected their man, or sought to get the sticks off someone else. Scuffles broke out amongst the naked men, and also in the crowd of spectators. Within five minutes it appeared to be over, or to at least to have reached the point where making sense of anything going on was impossible. And that was that - I pushed my way out and followed the stream of other people leaving, naked men running to the changing areas around us, and made my back to the station and back to my warm hotel room in Okayama, not entirely sure what to make of the evening!

I’ve put some blurry photos of the whole thing here. Ladies of a sensitive disposition be warned, buttocks are visible!

I went to Hiroshima, which is by necessity a very modern city. The peace park at its centre is full of trees and crowding around it are hotels, office blocks and shopping malls. It would be incredibly hard to make the connection between the destruction of Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped on it in 1945 and the city that it is today if it weren’t for the A-bomb dome; The skeletal remains of the concrete and metal building sat on the bank of the river next to the peace park, unchanged since it was gutted. In wartime Hiroshima, as in most Japanese cities, the majority of buildings were made of wood. Pictures taken a few months after the bombing show only a handful of concrete buildings left standing, while all around them are the charred remains of rubble and tree stumps. The A-bomb dome is instantly recognisable in those pictures, and I think it’s lucky that the city held onto it in its current state when people wanted to tear it down and move on.

Modern day Hiroshima is an incredibly friendly city, and I enjoyed my two nights there. Aside from the peace park and museum I made an excursion to nearby Miyajima island, home of the famous floating torri gate, which is the second of Japan’s most beautiful/photographed scenes that I’ve now visited - only one more and I’ve got the complete set! Miyajima is stunning, with wild deer, pagodas and temples everywhere you turn, and the famous gate sitting in the bay. I’ve moved on to a larger island now - Shikoku - the smallest of the major islands that make up Japan. Going to be spending a couple of nights here before seeing if I can make it to the naked man festival in Okayama! I’ll keep you posted…

Okay - here are the snow festival ones

After all that travelling around to get to Sapporo it was nice to spend a couple of days in a city just staying put! The Yuki Matsuri (snow festival) was huge, in terms of the size of the site, the size of the sculptures and the number of people that visited. The main action was centered around Odori park; a mile long strip of mini-parks criss-crossed by the main roads through the city, and along the whole length there were snow and ice carvings. The biggest sculptures were the backdrops to stages on which bands and other performances were dwarfed by the scale models of pyramids and sphinxes, a wooly mammoth the size of a house, and several movie and game tie-ins. Probably the most impressive of all the sculptures was a model of Inuyuma castle, that took several thousand people a month to make - with most of the intricate parts being created from moulds and then hand smoothed into place.

The smaller sculptures built by teams from around the world were often equally as detailed the professional jobs, and tended to be a lot funnier. Most of the ones involving Japanese characters were simply baffling, but almost every cartoon character in the world was on display somewhere or other, from Totoro to Thomas the Tank Engine, and I was delighted when I found Domo-kun standing to attention in one of the parks.

So wandering around Odori park, and the ice carvings down the road at Susukino, is pretty much how I spent my time in Sapporo! I had meant to go off into the Hokkaido countryside or go snowboarding, but it I never got round to it. I did manage a trip to the Sapporo beer museum (where I skipped the tour and went straight for the all you can eat and drink deal in the beer garden) and an evening in a little town called Otaru who have their own mini snow festival where they light up their streets and canals with snow candles (nice place, excellent sushi!) but apart from that I was mostly snow and people watching. Actually I probably would have made the effort to go snowboarding, but on what should have been my last day in Sapporo proper I managed to fall on my arse on some ice and bruise up my wrists, to the point where picking up my rucksack was agony! I figured trying to go sliding down a slope on a piece of wood in that state was too risky, and spent an extra day hanging out in the city while my bruises sorted themselves out a bit.

A bonus of bashing myself up though was that I was in the city the day after the snow festival ended, and it was quite fun walking around watching the demolitions teams bringing their excavators in to trash these intricate displays that had taken so long to build! Still, you can’t get too attached to your snowmen - and there’s always next year!

I’ve spent the last week or so exploring northern Honshū and I think I can safely report that there aren’t many other tourists here! The few that I have run into are either heading out skiing, or are on their way to Sapporo for the snow festival - but by a far more direct route than I’ve taken! Anyway, take a look at the places I’ve been to in the last seven days and witness the awesome power of the Japanese Rail network:

Matsumoto - laid back city with a pretty impressive castle and at least one great onsen! Stayed in a very friendly guesthouse where I was the only guest, but the owner shared plenty of local sake and kelp with me. Kelp is surprisingly tasty, once you get past its snot like appearance.

Yudanaka - SNOW MONKEYS! Actually, not as exciting as I’d hoped. I was expecting a huge lagoon full of monkeys diving around, but in reality it was just a monkey hot tub, built by the hotel down the road I suspect. Certainly not worth flying David Attenborough all the way to Japan to look at them (as the BBC did a few years back)

Nagano - The rather faded olympic podium in the middle of the city is a bit comic, but the Zenkuji temple to the north of the city centre is stunning, especially with all the surrounding buldings and trees draped in snow. I stayed in the youth hostel that’s in one of the temple buldings, which is great till you get up in the morning and discover there’s no hot water and the only person around is a monk who won’t stop chanting.

Matsushima - Reckoned to be one of the 3 most beautiful places in Japan by one of the thousand lists of these type of things that the Japanese produce, and the little bay with hundreds of islands in it is very pretty. It’s a hell of a walk up into the hills to get a view of the whole thing though, particularly when you keep getting lost on the way. Just about worth it though. So long as the cafe at the top is open.

Sendai - I didn’t make it out of the train station in Sendai city, though I did head out to the suburbs to stay in a hostel in an old farmhouse. Lovely building, shame about the highway and the McDonalds moving in next door.

Kakunodate - Old Samurai village in which you can look into old samurai houses. The ones that are open anyway. One of the nicest ones had had a concrete floor put into parts of it though, and you could walk around without taking your shoes off - It felt VERY wrong.

Morioka - Quite a nice little city. If I’d stuck around another day I could have seen a snow candle festival taking place around the old castle, but I figured I’ll have no shortage of snow and ice related festivals over the next couple of days.

Aomori - The city in the bay at the top of Honshū that is the last major stop before you go through the senkai tunnel to Hokkaido. I stopped off for lunch and got back on the train.

Hakodate - Here I am! Going to have a chance for a quick explore of the city tomorrow, but for now it’s very cold outside and I’m going to see if there are any amusing Japanese game shows on the hotel TV. Ta ra!