Fire cats (w/ video)

Winter is ending, and the cats come to play in the fires at Hazu.

We went to the Toba Hi Matsuri or Toba Fire Festival in Hazu again this year. We went by train and then met some friends down there.

Festivals are one of my favorite things. In America, festivals are great.. Irish Fest, Indianapolis Labor Day fireworks, Indiana State Fair, your hometown's random city festival ^_^). In Japan, they REALLY know how to make a festival, and they have had hundreds of years to perfect them.

Sum up of the basics of this festival: After walking around at the booths.. catching your fill of goldfish, eating your fill of chocolate-covered bananas, get your spot around the two giant bonfires-to-be. We have a secret spot in the trees behind the bonfires. Well, we thought it was secret but, this year there were about a hundred people there :(

At the starting time, you'll hear the chink, chink, chink of flint against stone: building a fire from the bottom up. A victory shout signals the successful spark, and then the bonfires are lit.



There is a sacred tree inside each of the fires--one for each team, the east and the west. Once the fires begin to roar, the two teams of local Hazu-ites--dressed in traditional festival wear--begin to race up ladders, into the bonfires! They are racing to pull out their team's sacred tree. If the east wins, then there will be a good harvest. If the west wins, there will be a bad harvest. But, our friend says, both teams try hard to win anyway. This is a video! Note the fire falling all over the guys and them jumping off as they catch on fire!




The festival wear is one of the best parts: they fashion the black and white banners of last year's festival into costumes that cover them from head to toe. The end result makes them look just like little calico cats! Meow! or since they're Japanese, nya~! ^_^

The joys of hand-me-downs

I've had the past three days off work. It was pretty nice.

Thursday, I decided to try to take my bike up to Mt. Yatsuomote, which is not too far from my home.

So off I go on my bike, following a map I got from the community center or something. I had just gotten to an area of Nishio I hadn't been to, when I hear someone coming up behind me fast. Well, I can't tell if he's running or maybe on bike or what, but I slow down and get pretty far over so he can pass me, and then, I hear someone bellowing something over an intercom in Japanese, and when I look, it's coming from a police squad car that's stopping beside me. And when I turn around, there's two police officers booking it after me! What in the world! So yeah, I stopped.
So they come up, and start saying stuff in Japanese, and somehow, I understood maybe they wanted some i.d. and stuff, so I start throwing my passport, and my international drivers license at them, though of course I have no idea what's going on... did i run a light or something? or am i supposed to have a license or something and no one told me??

so after 5 minutes or so of standing there and them radioing in my name and all my other information, through one of the officers limited English and my very limited Japanese, we somehow got communicated that, well, they thought I had stolen the bike.

Apparently, this red sticker on the back of my bike is a registration for high school students, and so when they saw it, and saw that I wasn't a high school student, they thought I had stolen it from somewhere. So they wrote down all the numbers, and found out it was registered to a girl named Chihiro... I tried to explain how the bike was given to me by my boss... and so they wanted all her information and stuff. Gosh, I wish I had a cell phone then.

Apparently, this Chihiro is the niece of one of the staff at MEC, who gave the bike to Hiromi, who gave it to me... so Yuka (the staff who gave it to Hiromi) said they called Chihiro, and anyway, it's all cleared up now.... And I definitely went home and scraped off those stickers... and decided not to go to the mountain that day afterall.... Lol.

Cullen, one of the teachers, said that he's heard of that before, and they stop foreigners especially... I guess Garry (one of the other teachers) has gotten stopped, too, and his bike never belonged to a high schooler... whatever. My red stickers are gone now, so *hopefully*... I won't be chased down again... :\ lol.