Yabusame

Once every three years, Tokigawa holds a samurai archery festival called “Yabusame.” Luckily, this year happened to be a Yabusame year. I heard about the festival from multiple people shortly after arriving in Tokigawa and thus, have been looking forward to it for the past year and a half. I was able to finally witness the event this past Sunday, January 20th.

Two horse and archer teams participate in the Tokigawa Yabusame. There are numerous other Yabusame festivals in other parts of Japan of various sizes. The most famous one closest to Tokigawa is held in the coatal city of Kamakura. If you're interested, you can check out photos from the Kamakura Yabusame at the following website: http://www.deadhippo.com/photo_albums/Kamakura_Yabusame/index.htm

Here’s a rundown of the Tokigawa festival:

8:00am: The horse, archer and “pit-crew” start out from their respective stables to walk to the festival site. For the Tokigawa team, it meant walking about an hour or hour and a half through town to the festival site at the base of the foothills in the Nishidaira neighborhood. The second team came from Ogawa, a neighboring town. Their walk took them up through the foothills between Ogawa and Tokigawa, probably about a 2-hour walk.

Separate tents and horse-hitching posts are set up for the two teams and they make their camp there for the day.

10:00am: Two men dressed in white robes lead the horse and archer processions out of their respective camps through make-shift gates made of bamboo, string, and paper lightning designs.

The two archery teams merge together and walk to the archery site, which consists of a long dirt track. Spectators line one side of the track on the safe side of a simple wooden fence that reminds me a lot of what we see at renaissance festivals for jousting competitions. People are also scattered up a small slope that leads from the head of the track into the woods.

A short opening ceremony takes place, then the archers perform the only show of the morning by running their horses down the length of the track three times (gallop down once, trot back to the start, gallop down a second time, trot back, etc).

10:30am-3:00pm: After the “running of the horses” was finished, the crowd disbursed and were left to their own devices until the main archery performance at 3pm. The horses went back to their camps to “relax.” The archery team pretty much did the same except for a small blessing ceremony that took place at the nearby temple.

The temple is also where most of the festival attendees ended up after the brief morning show. They dutifully tossed their coins into the offering box, rang the bell to wake up the gods and said a quick prayer. Of course I was one of those dutiful minions.

The temple was also selling the New Year arrows I mentioned in my “Happy Year of the Mouse” entry, and (mass produced) embroidered charms. I bought my first New Year arrow and two charms, one for travel and the other for sports….mainly because I liked the pictures on them. Three of my current or former students happened to be manning the tent selling the charms (I think the family of the brother/sister pair I found working in the tent own and run the temple). The former student had the wherewithal to whip out his cell phone Japanese/English translator to let me know which charms were which. Most of the charms were for studying (not a surprise). Besides my travel and sports charms, there were also “normal” charms that covered everything else, and family/children charms. But the best part about it was that my students were wearing really cute white and red temple garb, so I embarrassed the heck out of them by trying to take a million pictures of them in their outfits.

There was also a local group of some sort up at the temple offering free servings of something called “amesake.” It’s a winter drink that’s somewhat akin to drinking a really soupy rice pudding. There is actually a little liquid Japanese sake in the drink, but for the most part it’s non-alcoholic. There’s some ginger in the mix (which I didn’t know about until I saw a lady grinding ginger at the amesake table), as well as what I’m assuming is the curd scraped off whatever they do with rice in order to make Japanese sake (rice wine). The amesake at this temple was really good, although if the lady at the amesake table hadn’t thrust the cup into my hands, I would have passed on it. I’ve definitely had less desirable amesake in the past.

At the temple there was also a small side house where masked dancers and musicians were performing traditional Japanese numbers.

Along the side streets around the festival sites, there were some food and trinket stands set up.

After spending a bit of time up at the temple with couple Japanese friends I ran into after arriving at the festival …as well as running into and having brief conversations with numerous students, teachers and Town Hall employees, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself, and figured I’d wander amongst the food stands, buy random things to eat and see how well I could entertain myself for 4 hours. I kept running into the same 2 JHS students, Mio and Mami, both of whom lived in the neighborhood where the festival was taking place, which turned out to be advantageous. It was right at the time when my other friends had disappeared and I was prepping to entrench myself somewhere to eat and pass the time that Mio invited me to go with her and Mami back to her house. So of course I did! I consider it an extraordinary gesture to have a student invite me to their house.

Mio’s cousins were visiting for the festival, and one of her cousins, Ai, was a university student, which meant she was still studying English too. Mio and Ai were both very inquisitive as well as attentive to my questions and comments, so we had a good time eating the food Mio’s mother and grandmother had made for the festival, sitting under the heated coffee table and practicing both English and Japanese. Both Mio and Ai’s mothers joined us for long stretches of the conversation, and Mio’s sister, who is now in high school but was one of my JHS students last year, popped in and out of the little gathering. Talk about a lucky opportunity. :-)

3:00pm: The second half of the festival got underway. 2-3 times as many people were present for the afternoon portion of the festival as for the morning part (understandably). The archery teams were paraded onto the archery track again, this time with tall, wooden, numbered targets in tow.

The first thing the archers did was spend a couple minutes shooting arrows up into the air for the crowd to catch. The arrows have blunt ends, but you still wanted to make sure you were paying attention to where the arrows were going because they were quite long and made of bamboo, so when gravity took hold, they came down heavy.

This is probably the most popular part of the festival. As I understand it, catching (or nabbing off the ground as the case may be) an arrow is supposed to bring you good luck for the 3 years between festivals. A lot of elementary and junior high school students were positioning and repositioning themselves around the grounds to have the best chance to catch an arrow. I figured it would be like U.S. parades where maybe even the grown-ups want the candy tossed from the floats, but they give way to the smaller kids. Not the case with Yabusame. I saw middle-aged men and women emerge victorious from the bottom of piles of bodies that had pounced on a fallen arrow after wrestling it away from the competition, including elementary school-aged children. It’s definitely a no-holds-barred event. I made a comment about this to a Japanese colleague the week after the Yabusame, and they acknowledged that Japanese people get a little crazy during festivals. :-)

(Not only the archers were wearing costumes.)

After a couple of minutes of shooting arrows into the crowds, the archers made their first run down the track one at a time at full gallop to shoot at the first target.

They shot at one target at a time, trotted the horses back to the head of the track, spent a couple more minutes shooting arrows into the crowds, then made a run at the second target, and so on.

After finishing their three runs at the three targets, it was over, save the 2 closing runs where the riders waved hand-held Japanese fans with the Japan flags on them in some ceremonial style across the necks of the horses. The archery part of the festival lasted about an hour.

I’m still kind of trying to figure out the reasoning behind the separate morning and afternoon events with a 4-hour no-event lag inbetween (I'm sure it's just part of the 800+ tradition of the Yabusame), but nonetheless, it was an interesting experience. I just heard the event was broadcast on cable TV too. Whether that’s only a local cable channel or a broader cable channel, I don’t know, but I’d be dumbfounded if someone in Tokyo told me they watch our Yabusame on TV. Stranger things have happened though. Someone from Tokyo DID tell me they saw a news broadcast about the opening of the outdoor skating rink in my town…..eh?!?!