About a month later than scheduled, the weather suddenly picked up and I ventured out from under the table for a weekend of extremely Japanese fun. On Friday night, I wandered along a riverbank lined with cherry trees strung with lanterns, impatiently waiting for dusk to fall so that I could take the following fuzzy, poorly-lit pictures. They don’t really do the trees, lights or atmosphere justice at all.
On Saturday, some friends and I went for a drive and a picnic to indulge in Japan’s top spring obsession, Hanami, or cherry-blossom viewing. Allegedly, the purpose of cherry blossom viewing parties is to celebrate the coming of spring, and to take the time to appreciate the profound, fleeting beauty of the fragile cherry blossoms. In actuality, it’s just this season’s excuse to have a party and get drunk in public. I’m sure that some people do appreciate the blossoms for deeply spiritual and/or artistic reasons, but the rest of the nation sees the opening of the blossoms as the signal that it’s party time again. I swear this country would have a festival for just about everything if it were allowed, but I can’t help but respect a society that works and plays equally hard.
Sunday found almost everyone I know a couple of hours from home in Tsuwano, the only place at this end of the prefecture that makes it into guide books. It’s a very cute town, home to some interesting history, an Inari shrine up a mountain, some castle ruins, cute old streets lined with cute old buildings, and gutters filled with colourful carp.
Every spring, Tsuwano hosts Yabusame (horseback archery) which is what we were there to see. Basically, archers clad in tradition riding gear shoot a series of wooden targets as their cranky horses hurtle unwillingly along a track. There’s a great deal of pomp and ceremony involved in most of the proceedings, given weight by the intense, blood-chilling war cries of the archers, and undermined by uncooperative steeds and inconveniently placed horse poop.
Good times. I’m glad they shoot away from the crowd.
No comments:
Post a Comment