Kurama Fire Festival

All day Monday I debated whether or not I should go to the Hi Matsuri in Kurama Japan. Seeing as it only happens once a year and is supposed to be a really big and really beautiful festival, I finally decided to go. Since it is a fire festival, I had all day to decide since the fires aren't lit until dark anyway. So at 6:00, I boarded a train to take me to Kurama.

Well, actually the train doesn't go directly to Kurama. It goes to Demachiyanagi (henceforth called Demachi), which is in Kyoto. From there you have to switch from the Keihan line to the Eizan Line and take the train all the way to the other end of the line--Kurama. But, at Demachi, there is an absolutely wonderful little ramen shop where I can get what essentially translates into a Chinese steamed vegetables and meat donburi (rice bowl). It is absolutely wonderfully delicious. So, we stopped there to eat before we switched train lines.

Kurama is thirty minutes up the mountain by train and is a lovely little town (we're talking a town the size if Cass, Arkansas on a normal day) that once a year has a festival that makes it into a town the size of Conway, Arkansas for one night. The festival is a harvest festival that is meant to welcome the kami home (because apparently the Kurama kami are migratory and only spend part of the year in Kurama. Who knows where they go during the summer). Kurama is a surprisingly tolerant town for Japan--international students and non-Japanese are regularly allowed to participate in the festival, including pulling the portable shrine. While I did not take part in this, I saw several familiar faces pulling the shrine from one end of town to the other. For Japan, this is exceedingly unusual because we live in a group society that doesn't generally like outside groups trying to do inside group things. Normally, a non-Japanese participant is frowned upon, but in Kurama, they were welcomed in droves. But, this is Japan, of course, so non-natives of Kurama were NOT allowed to play the big drums.

When we arrived in Kurama, the torches had just been lit and were led from the far edge of town up the hill to the shrine. These torches require at least three people to carry them and are often three times taller than the men who carry them. They are brought to the other end of town where the shrine is located and cast into the fire at the foot of the shrine. This fire is a very large bonfire that is wonderfully warm on a cold night. Most of the night I always managed to be at just the right place for a perfect camera shot; however, my camera's batteries died so I only have three pictures to show for it. I have several that I took with my phone's camera but I cannot get them from my phone to the computer yet.

Once the fire is built, the portable shrines are brought out of the temple by the townsfolk, carrying the ornate gold-plated and highly detailed box on their shoulders. Actually, there are two of these gold boxes. Only men from the town are allowed to carry the boxes on their shoulders, but once the boxes have been moved from people's shoulders onto rolling carts, one cart is generally pulled by men of the town and the other is pulled by women and gaijin. Crowds are allowed to see the fire and the temple while the two portable shrines are moved from shoulders to rolling carts.

The shrine itself is absolutely beautiful at night. I have decided that I must go back during the day too because only the path is lit at night. But, you can hear many streams and waterfalls nearby so I imagine that it is quite beautiful in the daylight too. You climb up about one and a half block's distance to get to the shrine entrance, and then up about two stories of stairs to get to the main part of the shrine. Along that flight of stairs is a very VERY large tree. I had heard in Shinto class that trees sometimes become kami (gods) but until you actually see such trees, it is difficult to understand why. But when you see this tree, you are so struck by it's sheer size and height that you are in awe and it's easy to see why someone might call it a kami. It is a simply amazing tree! And at this time, it was 11pm and I missed my chance to leave and catch the last train from Demachi to Makino station. So, I realized at the top of the shrine that I wasn't going home until morning. Oh well, the festival was supposed to last all night, or so we were told...

Back down out of shrine, the carts are finally prepared and pulled down the main street to the bottom of the town (this town is built on a mountain, remember?) where there is a wooden stage that has been built in preparation for the coming of the portable shrines. There is where the rest of the festival takes place, where the shrines are put side by side on the stage and where preists offer the first fruits of the harvest to the kami. There is dancing and squid is cooked around two fires for the kami. None of this food is eaten by anyone. After the large torches are burned on top of the two fires in front of the two portable shrines representing the two returning kami, the festival slowly begins to die down.

And continues to die until about an hour after we finally left. We were tricked into staying with rumors of more festivities but that proved wrong, so we decided to walk down the mountain. At 1:00 in the morning. So we walked down the mountain until 2:30, when we were at least halfway down the mountain and still no where near Demachiyanagi. About that time, all the taxies at Kurama who had not found jobs carting people down the mountain made their way down the mountain. One stopped for us and took us the rest of the way to Demachiyanagi. Split four ways, it cost me 550 for the ride.

So, we found ourselves in Demachiyanagi at about 3 in the morning, where we were forced to wait until 5 in the morning for the first train out. That train was a local train stopping at every station between Demachiyanagi and Makino. To keep ourselves awake, we talked to each other, and to keep ourselves warm, we circled the block. When the train finally arrived, I can't begin to tell you how relieved I was. Though there are a great deal of stops between Demachiyanagi and Makino, I remember stopping at sanjo, then nothing until I got to Yawata. I'm not sure what woke me up, but I was fortunately awake to be able to announce, "Makino!" when we got there. Fortunately, we were the only people on the car (at that early in the morning, the japanese can discriminate against cars with gaijin in it). But, of course, falling asleep on the train is a quite normal phenomenon too among Japanese so I wasn't offending anyone either.

I arrived home at 6am the next day, utterly exhausted. I neglected to go to my morning classes--instead I slept until noon and got up to go to a workshop that I had agreed to attend on Friday. More later, my friends, because this has been an incredibly busy week!