The Neputa festival in Hirosaki was the first time I ever attended a festival in Japan. For that reason alone I think it was a wonderful experience. Despite our initial difficulties in actually getting to Hirosaki by train, we did get there, although by other means. We then set out to view the parade. Just as we got closed in on the parade it started to sprinkle, not too much though. Certainly it was no comparison to the torrential downpour that we went through the following night for Nebuta!
We turned a corner off of one street onto another and we began to hear music and see the lights of the floats. I know that I was pretty excited, experiencing Japanese festivals was one of the things that I had definitely looked forward to from the time I was accepted to JET. Even from that distance the first floats looked impressive. When we actually did get to the corner where the floats were turning and could see reasonably well, I was amazed by the art work on the floats. I was also very impressed by the size and height of the floats which were beyond anything that I had expected. The one thing that I remember seeing on the large round floats was the significant effort that was put into making sure that float would actually pass underneath all the overhanging wires. I was quite surprised to see the guys on the inside of the floats carefully lowering the top edges of the float as well as grabbing the wires and lifting them over. I guess I had imagined that no one would ever build something that might come into contact with overhanging wires.
I had been told that most of the floats are community constructed and designed and it became clearer once we moved to an area with better sight lines. I could see the number of people that surrounded the floats: children, men and women all taking part in some way in the community’s float. It was funny to see the different amounts of spirit that some people had for the parade. Some people were very excited about participating, while others seemed to be more of a dead weight on the float than helping to move it along. Still the sight of a few dozen people following a float, playing flutes and so on does lend a note of authenticity to the idea of community participation. There were truly some fantastic floats that we saw, including some that moved, and one particularly impressive pagoda.
The one element of the parade that I really enjoyed and waited for, was the taiko drumming. I have always liked the taiko drums but I had never ever seen them, live, on the scale that they appeared in the parade. I was really impressed with the amount of noise that they made and the number of drummers that they had. I was impressed by the fact that the drummers on the ground would switch off and allow each other to rest. I wondered, and I still wonder how the drummers who sat on top of the drums managed to rest, or if they just worked through the whole parade. The really impressive guys however, were the ones who carried the drums that were as tall as they were. To see these guys walk down the street leaning back so that the drums don’t touch the ground while holding their hands level with their heads in order to hit the drum face was really impressive. Mike claims to have once done it for two minutes, he calls it the most difficult two minutes of his life.
All in all Neputa was a wonderful experience and I was thrilled to have the chance to see it. Now that I think about it though, my memories, as good as they are, would probably be helped if I developed my pictures!