There’s a lot that could be said about my month long trip across Japan, but a lot of it is pretty mundane. Dan and I were wandering around the country for a fair bit of time and I don’t think you really want to hear about every “nap in a smokey coffee shop while the waitresses made concerned eyes at us”, funny as they were sometimes.  I’ve decided to pick five of my favorite parts of the trip and give them each a proper post, starting right now with my adventure attending one of Japan’s top 3 biggest/best festivals, the Osaka Tenjin Matsuri. I may fill in some other posts if I have the motivation. Lately, it has been lacking.

A Little Backstory…

Dan and I set out on our grand adventure as per our original plan of having no plans what so ever, and seeing what happens.  Naturally, there were bound to be some mistakes, and some adjusting to this new way of life.  We ended up jumping through Fukuoka, Hiroshima, and Kobe in about 3 days.

Protip: Don’t do this. You will want to die.

It took us a little while to figure out that when you’re moving that fast if you don’t have hotel reservations waiting for you, you can spend a lot of brain power accidentally stressing.  And so over mediocre ramen (but some pretty delicious meat buns) in Kobe’s semi-famous Chinatown, Dan and I made the executive decision to hole up in Kyoto for a longer stretch of time, and maybe get out to the other parts of Kansai (Osaka, Nara) if we had the time or inclination.

We found a reservation at a lovely little hostel called The Sparkling Dolphins Inn (you cannot make these things up), run by a charming younger Japanese couple.

Most of the other people staying in the hostel were Spaniards, Germans or Scandanavians of some kind, although one of our favorite weird travel buddies was an 18 year old French kid traveling alone around Japan named Sebastien. He came to Japan after winning a scholarship/contest, and had managed in very short order to get all of his assets frozen. He was living off of small money orders from his parents. He had not-so-great English, and no Japanese. He also had a profound love for Coke-a-cola tallboys, and Mr. Donuts brand donuts, and was often heard remarking to that effect.

Sebastien: Wanderer, scholar, lover of “the big can coke-a-cola”

What the Hell is a “Tenjin”

After hanging out in Kyoto for a day or two, I remembered that way way back when I was still on Kikai I had read something about some “huge”, “magnificent”, “best in Japan” type festival called the “Tenjin Matsuri” which always happened in Osaka around the end of July.  Our timing just happened to work out that we could go see it first hand, and decide whether it lived up to the hype.

The Tenjin matsuri is held in honor of a scholar who was deified as the patron of learning and art after his death.  “Tenjin” 天神 are the kanji for “sky” and “god” and are either the name or type of the god he became. Someone can probably explain that better than I can,  but since the purpose of the festival in theory: honor Tenjin, and the purpose of the festival in reality: get smashed with your friends, wear traditional clothes, and watch something move or explode or both, are completely separate it’s mostly academic.  The Tenjin matsuri is famous for a huge parade in the afternoon, followed by an equally huge boat precession down at the river in the evening with accompanying fireworks.

The train networks being what they are, it was no real difficulty to day-trip down into Osaka for the festival, then return to the hostel at night.  Sebastien, our young French friend, was also along for the ride.

Pre-Festival-Nanigans

Our adventures began on the express train between Kyoto and Osaka.  Dan, Sebastien and I were standing on the train, making our little gaijin-circle of protection, and a random girl from New Zealand walked up and asked something train related. I can’t remember what, but for the sake of the story lets assume it was important, and Dan and I looked very roguishly handsome and talented in the course of answering it.

She was then so charmed that she stuck around to talk to us, and the conversation eventually swung around to “we’re going to a festival”. Since we were so very handsome and talented, she asked if she could come along, and of course we let her. It would have been an affront to our handsome, talented selves not to.  It was not however in my handsome and talented best interests to remember her name, soooo…

Japanese festivals, at least the summer ones, almost always have the same basic feel to them.  Every street and open area within a certain radius of whatever is being blown up, or paraded, gets lined with tens to hundreds of stalls run by enthusiastic Japanese hawkers selling Japanese festival food, or sometimes small trinkets or tiny live fish (I’m 95% sure they’re not food). The Osaka Tenjin festival was like this, only the stalls stretched for about a mile in every direction, centered around the river that flows through the north of the city.

The walk along the river was an endless mess of fried noodles, candied apples, takoyaki (octopus donuts, as my kids like to call them), and just about everything on a stick you could ever want, from the ubiquitous frankfurter (In Japanese: Huranku farutaa. Sometimes it gets written on the signs in English like that, and we get to have a good laugh), to whole squid and salt grilled mackerel, from pork-belly to cucumbers. While the number of sticked foods might have given the average American festival a run for its money, I would like to point out that they have yet to come up with cheesecake on a stick, and it also begs mentioning that there was no sign of chocolate covered bacon anywhere on the premise. Minnesota – 2.

Squid on a stick, anyone?

The 4 of us walked around the riverbank, soaking up the pre-festival atmosphere, getting to know our new Kiwi friend and listening to Sebastien recount The Tale of Sebastien’s Money (which he was getting much better at telling), while watching the stalls set up. In Dan’s case he was also trying to see if he could leverage his functional Japanese vocabulary of about 50 words to talk his way onto one of the boats which was going to be in the parade later that night.  He did not succeed, but it was an admirable effort.

I for my part enjoyed chatting with random toothless-to-varying-degrees stall owners, and ambushing them with my Osaka accent.  Most of my major Japanese parent-figures have spoken with some degree of the Osaka accent, and it crept in at some point.  Under normal circumstances I can confuse people a great deal by using it. It would be like a Japanese guy who spoke with traces of a southern drawl, or maybe a Bronx or Bostonian accent would be a better analog.  Just take a moment and picture it.

Apparently though, using this accent while actually in Osaka just completely melts faces.  I was particularly pleased when I responded to one of them and his 9/10 year old kid, with this just priceless confused look on his face, screams out ” HE’S JAPANESE!!!!” and his dad proceeds to slap him on the back of his head and tell him “Don’t be an asshole”.

In Which Dan Is Shameless to Great Effect

After a good bit of wandering and eating things on sticks, we settled down near the river under some trees to wait for the boat parade and the fireworks to begin. It was still pretty early so we managed to get close to the front, with only one large group of picnicking 20 somethings between us and the water. It was a pretty sweet spot.

We sat around chatting as it grew steadily darker, admiring how well prepared (and cute) the group in front of us was.  Tragically, as we were waiting it got dark enough that the food stall near us decided to turn on their portable generator to power their 2 sad, bare little light bulbs.  All generators come with some amount of noise, but this generator was apparently up for generator of the month or something, and was particularly enthusiastic.

At some point I wandered off to go to the bathroom and take photos of strangers (2 separate activities) and by the time I returned Dan had managed to:

1. Approach the group of Japanese kids in front of us, completely cold, and with no real Japanese to speak of, and challenge one of them to rock-paper-scissors.
2. Ride this introduction into being invited to sit with their group, and drink their beer.

After I returned Dan then managed to:

1. Further expand on this invitation to merge our two groups.
2. Ascertain that every girl in the group was either married or had a boyfriend.

Proving once and for all that being utterly shameless in the face of potential embarrassment will get you much much further than fluency.  Knew there was a reason I traveled with that guy.

In Which Boats Are Paraded, and Fireworks Fired

Right around sunset the boats started moving. We’d been seeing them moored along the riverbank for hours now, and during some brief moment when we weren’t looking they snuck down and filled them with people and entertainers.  They started gliding by, beginning a wide circuit which would take them up one bank and down the other over the next two to three hours.  Then all at once they started shooting off the fireworks, and at this point it gets hard to do the moment justice in words.

The water reflected every pinprick of light, from the fireworks over head, to the torches, paper lanterns and giant glowing advertisements for beer to insurance to colleges riding on some of the boats.  The floor to ceiling plate glass windows on the skyscrapers all around us also caught all that light and reflected it back, filling the otherwise darkness with hundreds of thousands of glowing tracers. The crowd behind us had filled in so thickly that there was almost no hope of escape (without the clever use of a gaijin-smash or two), everyone wearing flowery summer yukata, and sporting elaborately styled hair (the men, often more so than the women).

Each of the boats was packed with customers seated at tables and as they’d drift by the MCs on the boats would call out for everyone on shore to wave to them and cheer.  Sometimes they got so close we could reach out and shake their hands, and at least once the four of us got called out by an announcer asking us how we liked Japan, or cheering that we could make it down to enjoy the festival with them.

All the while somewhere in the middle of the river a large traditional looking barge had some sort of very long, elaborate, religious ceremony going on as far as we could tell completely independent of the rest of the festival. I guess that was the “honoring Tenjin” part of the festivities.

The boats and fireworks went on like this, with no noticeable drop in momentum, for no less than 3 hours.

It went on for so long in fact that we started taking it in turns to go watch, a group up at the fence near the water, and a group continuing the serious business of drinking all that beer and having conversations in broken English and Japanese.

At some point during one of my beer rotations later in the evening, two of the guys from the group walked up to me and took positions on either side of me. With very solemn expressions painted on their faces, one of them looked me in the eye and then slowly gestured towards his crotch:

“In English…penis?”

A discussion of synonyms and the nuances of English vocabulary followed. There are now two 20-something Japanese guys running around in Osaka armed with a cold war era nuclear arsenal of English vulgarities, and names for their junk.  Apparently they had asked Dan this same question earlier in the night, but either found his answer unsatisfactory, or wanted a confirmation.

Alas, eventually the festivities had to start wrapping up. The crowds began slowly shuffling off towards the subway entrances, the vendors hocking the last of their food at cut-rate prices (which we took advantage of to get chocolate covered bananas on sticks), and the boats returned to the riverbanks from which they came.

We said goodbye to our Japanese hosts, and the four of us joined the crowd to slowly work our way back to the trains to catch a ride back to Kyoto.