Kakunodate Festival (9/8)

On the 8th, I went to friend Maggie’s town for a crazy festival. It lasts 3 days (Friday, Saturday, Sunday), with the biggest events on the last night. Since it’s two hours away, I couldn’t stay for Sunday night, but Saturday was more than enough to get a taste of the festival. So, for this one, each neighborhood builds a huge floats on a big wooden cart, and then everyone in the neighborhood helps pull it around the town for all three days. As they go through the different neighborhoods, they have to stop at certain check-points and ceremoniously ask permission to continue through the area. Also, since the streets are really narrow, and the carts are really big, occasionally two neighborhoods would come to an impasse. In that case, the heads of the two floats would meet and negotiate for position, though I didn’t really understand why they did that because, more often then not, they would just decide to crash into each other. They would basically ram into each other until one of them gave way! The first two days, the crashes are orchestrated for the tourists (so you can go to a certain block at a certain time to see one), but I guess, on the Sunday it’s more of a demolition derby free for all. In case it doesn’t sound crazy enough, apparently there have been deaths at this festival before…

When I got to Kakunodate that Saturday, Maggie took me to her friend’s house, and the lady helped me get dressed up in festival clothes (Maggie already had hers on). Once I was all set to go, Maggie and I joined her neighborhood’s float, and we helped pull it around town! It was kind of fun, but a lot of work. It was amazing how EVERYONE in the town turned out for this thing (even people who have moved away come back for it) and was willing to spend three days working together for their neighborhood. The best part was getting to pull the giant float down the tiny streets, but, I guess since they do it day/night for three days, they only pulled it for like 100ft, and then would take a break for one reason or another (like a check-point or negotiation).

Later in the evening, JETs from all over started to show up, so we all helped out Maggie’s neighborhood and walked around and saw the festival. At one point when we were walking, this man (with wife and small boy) stopped us on the street and asked us to speak English to his son. Since I was the only JET who can understand Japanese (and therefore what the man asked), I bent down and said hello to the little boy. He’s three years old and could understand “What’s your name,” “How are you,” “How old are you,” etc. It was really impressive! The dad was really excited to meet all of us (and, I must admit, we were an eclectic bunch of foreigners – two Americas, a Canadian, an Australia, an Englishman, and a Jamaican), and I ended up talking to him there on the street for a good 20min. It was funny because he was really nice and normal and what-not, so we were just talking about regular stuff, so I forgot that none of the other people I was with had the slightest clue what we were talking about! Kind of weird.

Anyway, it was a crazy time (we even got interviewed for the festival website – so there’s video of us somewhere out there on the web, but I haven’t been able to find it), and we finally saw a big crash at midnight. After that, I was exhausted, so I went back to Maggie’s and went to bed. She and Phil were out pulling the float around until 3:30am!!

I really liked hanging out with such an international crowd of people. (I learned a lot about Canada and Jamaica that night. ☺) In the end, I thought it was a ridiculous festival, but really fun, and I enjoyed getting to actually be a part of it.