I love the energy and colour of most festivals in Japan. (And the food stalls.) The Autumn Thinking Festival, at Osaka’s Tenmangu shrine, isn’t your average shindig.
First off, you’ve got to find it. Usually that just means following the noise and the crowds. I made my way to the shrine for the evening, and the main entrance was shut. A few other people were standing outside it, scratching their heads.
Searching for the one open door meant walking almost the whole way around the grounds. A trip I almost didn’t make, because you couldn’t hear anything coming from inside.
I tell a lie. You could hear crickets. Oddly clear and repetitive crickets. To create and enhance the ‘quiet’ atmosphere of the festival, they were piping in the pre-recorded sound over several speakers.
We watched, in silence, while immaculately-dressed Shinto priests chanted and played flutes. The scent of incense filled the air, sort of comforting and cloying at the same time. Turns out there’s a very fine line between creating the ideal atmosphere for meditation and sending people to sleep.
Someone in white was holding something, which I’d assumed to be a koto (a Japanese harp). It turned out to be a branch, visible when he started dancing and waving it about. Finally, some movement! He stepped, cautiously and deliberately, towards the fire in the middle. Were we about to see a fire dance? Nah. When the music stopped, he went all the way back to where he started. So much for ceremonies that signify progress…
There were eight priests kneeling behind lanterns that whole time. They each had sticks, and took it in turns to tap them together like some kind of rhythm game.
One of the lanterns went out during the chanting, and for a second I felt like I was watching a mid-afternoon gameshow. “Sorry, the answer we were looking for there was ‘ommmm’. Bad luck!”
After an hour of John Cage’s 4’33” on repeat, we were asked to leave our seats and join a procession. Finally, we were literally getting somewhere. Most festival parades start somewhere else and head towards a shrine. So where were we going? Nowhere, as it turned out.
Our parade was basically a reverse fire drill. We did an awkward lap of the shrine grounds, behind two priests carrying burning torches.
“Your fire exits are here, here and here… but they’re all still closed. Good luck with that!”
The shrine shuffle took us right back to the seats we’d vacated not 10 minutes previous. And, just as some of us sat back down, the electric lights came on and we were told to go home. I guess the climax of a thinking festival is realising you could be doing better, more productive things with your time.
Yeah, that sure gave me a lot to think about. Like ‘where the heck was the noodle stand?’
