Agonshu Hoshi Matsuri

So tonight I am again faced with the question of what to blog about. One of the reasons I joined NaBloPoMo was to motivate myself to catch up on blog posts I've missed over the past several months. Thus tonight I take you back in time... let go of the present and drift away, sailing back, past the festivals of summer, past the rains of June, past the brief but beautiful bloom of the cherry blossoms. Tonight we go back to February 11, which in Japan is known as National Foundation Day, commemorating the establishment of the first Emperor, in the year 660.

A few weeks prior to this day, I had been stumbling along with the crowds through Osaka Station, hands in my pockets and teeth chattering in the bitter cold, when out of the corner of my eye I saw two immense posters for the Agonshu Hoshi Matsuri. Agonshu is one of Japan's "new new religions", most of which contain a creative mixture of elements from Buddhism and Shinto, along with a smattering of ideas from other world religions such as Christianity or Hinduism, and perhaps a pinch of new-age religion and pseudoscience. Top it all off with a charismatic leader, and you have the recipe for a phenomenon that will spread like wildfire in a culture where belonging to a group is a priority of utmost importance.

I sipped some of my homemade milk-tea to soothe my sore throat as I sat with Yuki, David, and Olivier on our shuttle bus ride up into the mountains from Kyoto. The religion's compound was located deep in the forest on the side of a mountain, slightly removed from central Kyoto, and the winding mountain roads were choked with chartered buses and an endless stream of taxis. Disembarking and joining the flow of the crowd, we entered the grounds. Several festival centers around the mountain were separated by narrow roads, and as we walked along with the throngs of thousands, we passed some small parades and musical performances given by priests and volunteers dressed in flamboyant robes.



Eventually we began to approach the main event grounds. The first task that awaited us was to write down our prayers on Buddhist prayer sticks. A massive sign of staggering proportions towered over us, indicating the exact wording we were to use when writing prayers.



Inside the grounds, we were faced with a myriad of stations packed with eager well-wishers lining up to scrawl prayers on the seemingly endless supply of prayer sticks that churned through what impressed me as a highly efficient example of supply-chain and event planning. Behind the scenes (and not visible in my picture) armies of pom-pom-bedecked workers carried boxes and boxes of the sticks to and from the writing stations with military precision.



Eventually these prayer sticks were tied into bundles and stacked en masse in several stations on the lower grounds. The sheer prayer density per cubic meter was overwhelming.



These were not static preparations by any means. The great machine had been continuing since the morning, crowds of people packing in and writing down their prayers as other crowds of people streamed out. In the middle, those who weren't busy buying good-luck charms and trinkets stood in the stands to behold the spectacle of the festival's main event, which took place in an enormous field of bare earth below.



As we walked in and beheld this spectacle, we and the crowd were swept up with the pounding of drums and the rhythm of chanting, broken from time to time with the echoing call of a horn that would have sounded more at home rallying an army in The Lord of the Rings than keeping time to a festival in modern Japan. Below us, the ranks of drummers and chanters formed an unmoving backdrop to the ant-like rows formed by bearers of prayer sticks busily scurrying back and forth.



Yet, we barely noticed any of this, for in the center of this maelstrom of activity stood two enormous bonfires, flames reaching some six meters in height swirling and broiling above the miniscule figures of the soot-covered people running about on the ground. Even in the back rows of the stands, we could feel the intense waves of heat on our faces.



The fires were awe-inspiring. In each of the massive fire pits made of heavy wooden timbers, the ferocious power of nature lurched about, fiercely threatening to tear free from its bonds. Below, the keepers of the fire tirelessly hurled buckets of water on the timbers to keep the flames contained. Vast human chains provided hundreds of gallons of water to the base, as armies of bundle-hurlers swarmed around them, hefting more and more of the hand-written prayer sticks into the heart of the ravenous inferno.



For what seemed to be an eternity, this perfectly-choreographed dance to the pounding of the drums fed the fires below with the prayers of the masses until, at the appointed time, the drums and chanting abruptly ceased. Only the minimum number of fire-tenders remained at their posts as all the other workers knelt, their uniforms blending into a sea of white cloth and multicolored pom-poms tinged with soot.

As giant red fans were moved to block the intense heat from the fires, the charismatic leader ascended to the dais. Holding high his golden ... um, buddhist thing that I don't know the name of ... he blessed the onlookers and the world, announcing his own prayers for world peace and prosperity.



After the leader's speech, the drums returned, and the grounds exploded back into activity, the endless hurling of prayer sticks and water whirling back into motion, feeding a new influx of handwritten prayers to the insatiable infernos as distant onlookers found themselves caught in the vicious struggle between the mighty fury of the towering pillars of flame and the bite of the cold mountain winds on that overcast February afternoon.