Matsuri Madness

My neighborhood held its Autumn Festival this Sunday, ending a whole week of backbreaking and liver-crizzling preparation on the part of me and the Dudes’ Club of Minatoura.

The Dudes’ Club isn’t really a club. It’s just the collection of random guys from the area who happened to wander into the Community Center last week when we were “practicing” for the festival. What did we practice? Beer, then shōchū, and also some sake. Oh and we were supposed to sing a song, but the lyrics sheet they gave me only had half of the song on it. Plus it was one of those atonal, beatless traditional Japanese songs that sound like gibberish to anyone who didn’t grow up listening to it.

I was told to show up at 6am on Saturday morning to prepare for the pre-festival. Luckily I had a rockin’ hangover from the JET party the night before (thanks to Angie for throwing the best party I’ve been to since I got here), so I slept right through it. To apologize I offered as a sacrifice one of the female JETs from Ōzu; the men became so engrossed in being pervs that they forgot all about my little faux pas. A couple games of strip rock-paper-scissors later, we called it a night.

The day of the main event, I actually managed to drag my ass out of bed by 9 and grudgingly start drinking with the blokes at 9:30. They dressed me up in a yukata, tabi, and sandals made of straw. They then handed me an empty metal can and a bamboo stick, and made me run around with a bunch of guys from house to house, banging on our cans and singing our incomprehensible song (which is actually quite pervy if you read the lyrics). After an hour or two of this, as well as dragging by rope a giant ceremonial wagon down the roads, I got sick of it all and hid out at a friend’s house for a while.

Needless to say, this weekend was anything but restful, but it was, all told, a lot of fun. The Japanese set the bar for public drunkenness very high; I will strive to better meet their strict standards in the future.

Edit: A choice line from the song:

姉ちゃんちょと待て　良い物くわす　息子の皮むいて　実をくわす

English:

Wait a second baby, I’ll give you something good to eat. I’ll peel the skin of my wang and let you taste the fruit.

I emphasized “wang” because it’s almost exactly that blatant in the original Japanese. There are lots of even worse lines in this thing, involving vaginas among other things, but they all have puns that just don’t work in English, or I just don’t understand the dialect well enough to translate it right.