Festivals and Holidays in Japan

This weekend was the Honjo City Festival, which is celebrated over two days (Saturday and Sunday). The city streets are hung with colorful paper lanterns, and in empty lots stages and floats are set up. The festival is basically like a city-wide block party. On Saturday night, children perform dances and taiko drumming that they've been practicing, and families meet up, eat tasty festival food, watch the performances, and play the usual goldfish-catching and target shooting Japanese festival games. On Sunday, starting pretty dang early in the morning (those taiko drums are LOUD!), teams of people pull the floats through the city streets, playing drums, shakuhachi and shamisen. They stop at various points along the routes so the kids can dance some more, and old men circulate with bamboo flasks and cups, trays of dried squid, and boxes of Popsicles. If you're me, you might get special attention because you're foreign, and find yourself invited to sit/squat with a group of old guys who are very friendly, force-feed you sake and squid, and can't really communicate with you because they only speak Akita-ben ("ben" means dialect, and the Akita one is infamous - it makes regular Japanese look like learning to count to ten). Families mill around chatting, kids play in the streets, and it's generally a very sociable occasion - not unlike the great American block party, only this one goes for two days and involves alcohol at 9am. But, interestingly enough, festivals and holidays are two different things in Japan! Festivals don't qualify as holidays, because you don't get time off from work. Holidays are observed nationally and the whole country shuts down, including the ATMs. (Those close every night, too.) Festivals are usually local, and can be as brief as a single evening or as long as several days. Festivals usually have events to attend, like fireworks displays, dance or musical performances, or parades. Holidays are usually observed privately, with family and friends. Although some holidays, like Girls' Day in the springtime (Hina Matsuri), will feature public displays - in the case of Girls' Day, elaborate displays of traditional dolls with ritual sweets as offerings to the gods for good luck - most holidays won't have any visible public observance other than a lack of postal, banking and ATM service. Curiously enough, unlike the US, most retail businesses and restaurants continue to operate on national holidays. It seems that the Japanese have festivals almost every weekend - if your town isn't having one, there is probably one within an hour or two happening in a neighboring town. In addition to all these local celebrations, Japan also has more national holidays than any other country in the world. They also have a policy that if a normal day falls in between two holidays, the intervening day also becomes a holiday! It's gotten me wondering what role all these celebrations play in the fabric of Japanese society.

Culturally, the Japanese draw very distinct and harsh boundaries between the inner, private world and the outer, public world. Personal life is rarely if ever brought into the office - you may not know your deskmate is seeing anyone, until she takes a week off to go on her honeymoon. Even more so than this sort of public-private division, Japanese are discreet to the point of being secretive about their true thoughts and feelings. In Japanese, this is described as honne, or or true thoughts, and tatamae, which translates as somewhere between "social veneer" and "white lie". The language facilitates this, as most words and sentences are wide open to interpretation - sometimes so much so that the possible interpretations may be direct opposites. Compounded by the fact that directly saying "no" isn't the done thing in Japanese, untangling the intended meaning of a sentence can be tricky enough for a foreigner - and forget wading through to grasp the original feelings or thoughts of the speaker. What does this little linguistic detour have to do with festivals? Well, I've been pondering that myself recently. You see, another Japanese cultural institution that is often shocking to Westerners is their use of alcohol. In the West, Japanese drinking (which, I can hardly deny, is both frequent and copious) seems like a horrible national case of alcoholism. But I think this may be overlooking an important point.

In Japan, there is a belief that "Before alcohol, all are equals". Alcohol levels social barriers and hierarchies that are normally insurmountable - an important release in such a strictly delineated society. Alcohol is the key to the gate when an inferior needs to communicate with a superior, but is normally prohibited from doing so by Japan's rigid status hierarchy. Moreover, what is said over drinks is rarely held against the speaker; it won't be forgotten, so it's not a total get out of jail free card, but when drinking you can say many things in Japan, and to people, that you could never do when NOT drinking. Living in Akita, I have begun to wonder if what looks like alcoholism in the West isn't, in fact, an elaborate social ritual that is important to maintain balance in a distinctly Eastern society. Over drinks, and nowhere else in Japan, can a bit of that internal honne infringe on the external world where, at all other times, tatamae, that uniquely Japanese polite fiction, holds sway.