Day 78 in Japan - Aki Matsuri and Canadian Thanksgiving

It was a slower  morning this morning - Sam and I made pancakes to recover from our slight hangovers, and accidentally discovered something called Milk Cream. Milk Cream is not, as I initially assumed when I bought it, cream that you would eat with pancakes. Instead it's like a hard, super sweet white chocolate tasting substance that has no real relationship to cream, except for a stunningly similar appearance when you are slightly hungover in a supermarket.

After pancakes, washing and chores, we finally got to the fun stuff - the Okubo Shrine had a Matsuri on today! We have been hearing the boys practising taiko drumming for weeks now, and today was finally the day we got to see what this portable shrine thing was all about. Okubo shrine is REALLY our local shrine - it's literally at the end of our rod. I walk past it every day on my way to work, and I have always wanted to go in. But there is a sign outside of the open gate, which is like a no entrance sign. I don't know if that means no people, so I've never been in there. Unit today. As we approached the gates, we saw that they had erected a little impermanent gate over the road on the way in, and we started to get excited.

Step right this way...

And the excitement was totally justified - it was AWESOME! It was loud and muddy and dirty, and crowded and there were people eating karaage (fried chicken), yakisoba (fried noodles), a wide variety of foods-on-sticks that aren't usually on sticks, icecreams, kakigori (basically snowcones) and an awful lot of beer. We wandered and talked to people, smiled, took photos, ate enormous hot dogs, got our fortunes from a box (mine is a little bit good, Sam's is middle good) and watched the portable shrines parading around the jinja.

Getting my fortune from the cute Japanese girls

The crowds at the matsuri.

Wow, what a hot dog. On a stick.

The shrines were really the stars of the day - basically they are big boxes that are carried about by teams of about 40 men. There are little boys sitting up in the boxes, beating drums (the kids we have heard practicing for weeks), and the whole affair is meant to attract spirits, let them reside in the shrines, and carry them around to show their appreciation for the gifts of nature, and the benevolence of the spirits in the area. What I suspect is actually meant to do is give the boys some bonding time, let them wear some traditional clothes and show off to the girls, while drinking beers in the sun. Definitely a cause I can get behind. Each team consisted of boys ranging from quite young (the drumming boys were about 7-8 years old) up to older men in about their mid-60's. The older men were generally the ones giving instructions and blowing whistles, while the men doing the heavy lifting seemed to be mid-20's or older. The youngest boys on the lifting teams were probably about 16-17 - young enough to be my students - and these guys were the most enthusiastic, doing the majority of the yelling, chanting and girl-impressing.

Dark blue team with their portable shrine.

Light blue team - OUR FAVOURITE!

Working hard to keep the shrine up.

Mud, gumboots and tabi shoes.

Matsuri lanterns

One shrine at a time was "featured" in the ground of the jinja - they carried the shrine as long as they could, gave a bit of a show for the judges (I assume) outside the main building, a few members did some dancing (for the spirits), and they did a few laps. One team showed off by spinning the portable shrine around on the ground, digging up the turf. This was amusing, because with all of the people, and the rain last night, the ground was really muddy. The teams seemed to be made up of people from each little area around Okubo. We would have liked to figure out which our local team was, but we didn't really have the language skills for it. We ended up supporting the light blue shirt team, because they gave us beer, let us wear their Hapi coats, and were the most gaijin-friendly (or drunk - probably the same thing). They also did the ground digging thing, and had the most responsible-looking young men (some of the guys on the other shrine teams were really delinquent-looking).

Light blue forever!

West side (of Okubo) is best.

But all good things must come to an end, and even though we could have happily stayed until the sun went down, Sam and I had a train to catch to a Canadian Thanksgiving dinner being thrown by a fellow JET in Aioi. The dinner started at 4, so we had to leave the matsuri by about 2:30 to make it there on time.

Bye bye, autumn matsuri!

The dinner was absolutely fabulous - and we feasted on well into the night. It was my first thanksgiving dinner at all, and this is what I can remember of the menu: freshly baked bread, spinach soup/dip, real cheese, chilli, chicken roulade (turkey substitute), roast pork with plum reduction, mashed potato with gravy, hamburger casserole (yeah, you read that right), apple pie, pumpkin pie (my first), cheesecake, and a pavlova constructed by a real New Zealander (with cinnamon in the meringue part - very interesting). My contribution to the night was a box of goon - I thought it was appropriately Australian to show up with a cask of wine. And it wasn't TOO bad - it was Banrock Station red wine. I got a few odd looks showing up with boxed wine, but it was all gone really quickly, so I think I was forgiven eventually. Christine, the girl who put on the dinner, did an amazing job cooking for 12 of us and keeping her cool throughout, even though we were crammed into the small space, with the doors and windows closed trying to keep ourselves not-too-rowdy because the Aioi JETs all live in one teacher accommodation apartment block and didn't want to get into trouble, and we had three ovens going all at once. She was a total master in the kitchen, because her grandma was a French chef, and she used to help out around the kitchens, and she really impressed me with pulling the whole thing together. So we gave our thanks, by way of eating foor, to Canada. I'm not too sure what Canadian Thanksgiving is all about - I assume that they are thankful that they aren't American. HA!

Sam, Pav, Wendy and an elbow.

So a New Zealander and a Scot walk into a Thanksgiving dinner...

The dessert table.

Food Highlight of the Day: Now today was TRULY a day which was almost impossible to choose a standout food from. The stall foods from the matsuri would have made it any other day (fresh pineapple on a stick - YUM!). And I think any single dish that Christine cooked would have featured here on any other given day (particularly her grandma's hamburger casserole dish - a savoury mince/bread/cheese thing with corn soup thrown in). But I'm going to stab randomly and choose the pumpkin pie - because it was the first time I had eaten it. It was really delicious, and not at all the horrible dish that my mind had conjured up in childhood when I heard that people made pies out of pumpkin.