A night to remember why I forgot it

Wow was this past weekend amazing. Max's host family invited him and some of us to join in their area's yearly Matsuri. In a nutshell it is a festival annually carried out in order to show the local gods a good time. Half of it involves a bunch of men going around the neighborhood in traditional costume carrying a weighty palaquin (Mikoshi) via two long wooden beams. Every now and then they stop and they begin to pump the shrine up and down in the air shouting "Wa-shai!". I am proud to say that, this year, I was one of those men. Yes, MEN! haha but it really was a great time.

The other half of the ritual involves eating a huge dinner and drinking tons and tons of Sake and beer the night before until about four in the morning in the accompaniment of family, friends and later the area's elders. Needless to say, I got hammered. I had to; would YOU want to piss off the gods?! I also couldn't help it. We were suited up in traditional clothing and taken to a temple where we proceeded to sit in an open-air enclosure in which women constantly replenished our sake and beer for hours. Behind us were two massive (HUGE) bundles of bamboo, which were eventually set ablaze in the course of the night. It stands as the most amazing thing I have done while in Japan and perhaps elsewhere.

Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of the night gets hazy after the fire started really ripping into the bamboo. Yes, I drank far too much and I suppose I'm a little ashamed to admit that that night I bowed toward another god, one of porcelain. However I didn't drunkenly kick over, urinate on, or desecrate in any other way anything sacred so I consider that a big plus. It was all worth it. True, I was pretty exhausted the next day when I got with the Mikoshi-ing but the "carrying" was for the most part more like wheeling as it was resting on, erm, wheels. Fortunately every now and then we'd all take a break and be fed more beer; I, however, opted for refreshing and headache fighting water.

Well I'm going to try and get the pictures up as fast as I can so you can see all the crazy stuff that went down last weekend. Though all of Japan is amazing I don't think anything is going to top this. Well I'm out.