Shibukawa Dashi Matsuri

WA-SHOI! WASH-OI! わっしょい！Just a day after we Gunma newbies had to be forcefully torn apart from each other kicking and screaming (okay...maybe that was just me...) we had the great and glorious fortune to be semi-reunited at the biennial Dashi Matsuri, occurring in my MY VERY OWN CITY, Shibukawa! I was astonished and elated when as many as 30 Gunma JETs showed up to the festival on Saturday, and another handful on Sunday!

What is a dashi you ask? You're looking at one! Dashis are large floats with people on them, hitting drums and bells, playing the flute, or in the case of preschoolers, just going along for the ride. But these dashis aren't your run-of-the-mill Goodyear-tire parade floats, they are completely human-powered--meaning that dozens of Shibukawans pull each dashi, holding onto two long ropes, parading it throughout town!

Each dashi has a creepy mannequin which can be raised or lowered at the top of it. This mannequin represents a past emperor or a character from Japanese folklore. Pulling the dashis throughout the city is traditionally supposed to cleanse the city from demons and bring the city together in a spirit of community. In Shibukawa's dashi matsuri, each dashi is maintained and represented by one neighborhood of the city! The one in these pictures belongs to 寄居町, Yorii-cho, one of Shibs' many neighborhoods. I heard my neighborhood, Shimogo, practicing drums and flute every night the week leading up to the festival. I also live right by the community center, so I got the see the dashi being all gussied up. :) The dashis and the peoples' happi-coat uniforms have corresponding colors (in this case navy blue.) Sometimes, four or five dashi converge in an intersection, starting what I call a DASHI FIGHT:

AND let's not forget about the crazy two-lines-bash-into-each-other-and-jump-up-and-down-dance!

R.B. and S.C. get in on the fun.

Matsuris like this remind me of a few things:
a) how much Japanese value "everyone working hard and doing the same thing for the good of the team." You're not an individual so much as you are a cog in a machine. No one person is glorified or highlighted; it's all for the team.
b) How much modern technology and incredibly old tradition are beautifully intertwined.
c) How culture shapes our perceptions. By changing my lens and viewing this as normal rather than exotic, by recognizing that little kids grow up with these kinds of festivals every summer, I can see how it contributes to why they are the way they are today. I think it concurrently breaks down and reinforces the "humans are all the same inside" idea.

So that's that! Now that the weekend is over, I have a full week of school (but no classes yet...more on that later) until ~*~ThE FuJi ExPeRiEnCe~*~ next week. Yay!