I started drinking in earnest on the train, around 10pm. We were on the 9:42 train bound for ______ and I was leaving nothing to chance. I was apparently the only big drinker in our crowd, and even then only a big drinker by comparison. Nonetheless, it was obvious I would be pulling the weight around here so I double-timed it on my plum sake.
Usually I’m not a fan of the sake. It doesn’t get me very drunk, but it does get me sick. To hell with that, though, this evening was going to be Japanese start to finish. When you’re about to run bare-assed through the night in mid-February, being sufficiently inebriated is single most important priority you have. And I take my priorities seriously.
How did I end up doing this? Back in October when I first met Yasuhiro he had mentioned the Naked Man Festival, and that he had gone to it and participated with another English teacher two years ago. He had no plans to go back, but I decided it would be a spectacle I’d want to see. Over the coming months, though, it got lost in the shuffle between Thailand, multiple friends visiting, and weekend volleyball. I realized with Valentine’s Day rolled around that it was mid-February and I had already missed the festival. Then, on tha
t Thursday night, my friend Em, who had just visited me 3 weeks prior, invited me out to her place for some crazy Japanese festival. ‘A Naked festival, perhaps?’ I entreated. She wondered how I knew, and at any rate would I be willing to participate with her boyfriend, Taro. Would I?So there I was. We got off the train and B-lined it for a convenient store. The sake was coming on slowly and I needed to streamline the process. I chugged a beer and bought some more sake, and then we were off. We followed the crowd to the streets where Japanese men were already out marching around in the hundreds. All along the streets were changing tents, but upon inspection we learned these places belonged to some teams. Teams. Holy crap, what were the two of us going to do. But that worry aside, it was already getting close to eleven and we were still fully dressed. We accosted several authority figures before being pointed to the last standing Fundoshi booth, and we made it just in time. Taro and I bought our Fundoshi (diaper) and booties (booties) and looked for a place to change. There was one extremely long main tent where anyone could go, but the street outside was already packed with participants marching and spectators crowding around. I moseyed around the pack and walked into 3 dudes changing outside behind a truck. Right. They kind of just looked at me, so I asked politely where I could get changed. They just pointed to the giant tent we were all standing next to. Right. So I walked away.
Eventually Taro and I forced our way through the crowd and into the tent. Stage 1 accomplished. Now that we were ready to get changed the main problem was “how the hell do you change a 15 meter linen cloth into a dignified ceremonial dress?” To get this part of the equation wrong would spell certain disaster later, so
we needed to find an expert.The Japanese, who are usually more than welcome to helping a lost foreigner, are very jealous of their naked festival. Especially when the whole thing degenerates into a psychotic battle royale, foreigners become communal punching bags. But even more so, I guess they don’t want you there at all because no one was willing to help us get loin-clothed. We finally found a festival-appointed dude whose apparent job was to dress foreigners. He knew two words: ‘turn’ and ‘stop’. I volunteered to go first. I stripped down to nature’s blessing, and this dude hit me in the chest with my Fundoshi. It seemed he wanted me to hold one end. He went under and around the back, slapped me in the back, and bellowed for me to “TURN TURN TURN.” I turned. He said stop, and I stopped. He yanked, and I yelped. The unpleasant wedgy was betrayed by the cloth’s silky softness. Well, that’s not so ba-- I was turning again. More yanking, more turning. Finally he was tucking in the end and I was free. Relatively. It’s not easy to bend over in a Fundoshi. I discovered this while trying to put on my booties.
Here it was that I made the biggest mistake of the evening. I noticed that other people had duck-taped their booties on and, as mine felt quite loose, I tried duck-taping mine as well. Except I only taped the loose material down, as opposed to tying it all the way around. This would eventually lead to my undoing.
We thanked our new friend for dressing us, and headed outside with our stuff to drop with the girls. We smiled for some photo-ops, chugged some more sake, and then it was off to the races. Not having any idea what we were really supposed to do, we kind of just jumped in with the first passing group. This was a hazardous decision, and we were jostled around a bit until some younger guys grabbed us into their festival love chain.
We were marching/prancing down the street, chanting with our new buddies. They were chanting “Wasshoi! Wasshoi!” but it sounded like ‘irasshai’ or ‘what’s up’ by turns. I could get away with screaming mostly anything, so I did. We marched down the street, about 6 people abreast, and if you looked around beyond the person in front of you, you’d see thousands of people behind the police line looking back. And most of them were the wives, sisters, and daughters of the guys participating. Needless to say, I was all smiles.
At one point I saw a tussle ahead of us, between participants and cops. Uh oh, big trouble, I thought. But no, no one was being arrested. Guys were throwing punches and shoving cops, and instead of getting pepper-sprayed they were just being pushed back into the madness. It was then I understood that this festival was entirely sanctioned violence. Yikes. For guys who are generally quiet office-goers 364 days a year, this night was a lawless free-for-all. Wonderful.
I didn’t have much time to consider this because suddenly we were entering the temple grounds, the arena, the main event. This place was massive, and immediately I understood the true scale of this event. On the narrow streets outside you could guess how many people were there, but in the temple grounds you could actually see all the thousands. And they’re all looking at you. But no time to fret, we were about to enter the trial by ice.
Participants had to do a run around a “lake” which turned out to be a temple fountain. My adrenaline was flowing full steam so I jumped in with abandon. I barely felt the cold, but I immediately felt my booties coming off in the water. Shit. Shit shit shit. We exited and I was bootie-less barefoot. So was Taro. We knew we had fucked up somehow but there was no way to stop: the avalanche of drunk Japanese behind us wasn’t about to stop and our buddies were pulling us to the next stop. Fuck it, we just turned a bad ass evening into a certified crazy-mutha-fuckas ordeal.
So we ran. I tried not to think about my feet, but obviously trying to do that caused me to think about nothing other than the freezing cold dirt grating my soles and excruciating abrasiveness when someone else stepped on my foot. But then we stopped suddenly and started hopping up and down. Apparently you can’t run into a temple dripping wet (for heaven’s sake no!) so we huddled up hopping around, and the cloud of steam rising out of the middle was impregnable. We dried off pretty quickly that way; dry, but not warm, mind you. We ran up some stairs, rang a bell, and ran back down the other side, hooray. We did it! Or did we? Not quite. We had just finished the qualifying round.
We were guided back to the main temple ground with the other multitudes of naked men participants. There had to be two thousand already there and more were coming through the gate in droves. Everyone basically crowds around this raised dais, a couple meters off the ground with oversized stairs leading up to it, because this is where they throw the ceremonial sticks at midnight. About 100 people could stand up there comfortably, so obviously around 200+ were crammed up there fighting for space. Taro and I were standing at the bottom behind a temple column (padded, of course) looking up at this madness, and he turns to me and says “I’m glad its not us up there.” I took this opportunity to smile wickedly and respond that we didn’t come here to half-ass it. So we bounded up to the dais and shoved our way in.
The pushing and shoving evolves into this rhythmic tide of back and forth, and fight against as you may what you’re really trying to do is just keep yourself from being throw off the dais, because that would hurt. Taro and I were barely into the crowd, and so were in imminent danger. On one go round I was only kept from a tumble thanks to some good Samaritans who stand a step down, catching anyone they see on the edge. Unfortunately the guy next to me wasn’t as lucky and hurtled down, got tagged by one of the great stone steps and then smacked right into the column. Oh, so that’s what the pads are for.
After a few minutes or so of getting shoved around we decided we’d had enough, especially with the barefooted-ness really starting to grate. We tried to stepped down but were pushed back in. Apparently the same guys who save you don’t want you to leave either. Or maybe they just enjoy messing with foreigners. Whatever their reasons, they had us cornered because we really had no way to go. Being of superior intelligence, however, we waited for one guy to get distracted and then tag-teamed the remaining jailor, and escaped to freedom.
We got to the bottom and behind our column again just in time to see a real tussle. About 6 or 7 guys collapsed over the main edge all at once. Now people were falling right and left and no one seemed to take offense because it was all just a given part of the games, but out of this group that had just fallen arose one mean looking thug with long hair and taped knuckles. He started throwing punches and screaming bloody murder. He grabbed one kid who couldn’t have been older than 16 and started to pummel him. Anyone who tried to intervene was dissuaded by Mr. Long Hair’s even bigger and meaner friend -- this ugly juggernaut had to be at least 300 lbs. The kid was eventually pulled away by some old men, but Long Hair and Ugly Mo Fo continued romping around looking for fights. Unfortunately they were part of an even bigger team so not even a gang could have pushed them out.
But soon it was midnight. The main event. The true test. The lights were cut and a hush fell over the crowd. Hushhhhhh. Then… nothing. Then something. Maybe? You couldn’t tell. Standing in one spot for a long time was making me acutely aware of the pain in my feet. I was beginning to lament my inexperience when shit hit the fan. The whole left side of the dais burst forth (more of a collapse) with people and, instead of making room for them, the crowd I was in launched after them, sweeping me away. The race was on.
It resembled something of a massive rugby match. You could tell where the stick probably was, but there would require fighting your way through multitudes of angry drunks. Not much different from what we had already been doing, and its not like we had much choice in the matter. It was a fight or get trampled situation. So we fought. Well, I thought it was a “we” but I yelled to see if Taro was alright and he was nowhere to be seen. Damn, shit happens.
So I was fighting my way into the main nucleus. Every once in a while the momentum would shift drastically and it was a split-second pivot-or-fall reaction time. At one point my hand went down and I felt myself about to hit the ground, and literally willed myself to balance. I started muttering “just don’t go down, just don’t go down” to myself; there were no more good Samaritans.
The nucleus was moving towards the temple exit; once it got through there would be no chance to reclaim the stick. Some dude would break loose and run like a mother and that would be it. Until then, though, the fight double-timed in ferocity. Not helping the situation was the temple exit acted like a funnel, gradually getting narrower and squeezing out the weak. Unfortunately I was towards the outside and soon found myself fully off the ground, my feet pushing off the wall and my back into the main group. Fight or go down. The cops on the other side of the wall took great pleasure having this foreigner before them in an awkward predicament, and started chanting “Fight! Fight! Fight!” and I screamed “I’m fighting, damn you, I’m fighting!” I was having fun, really.
Then the tide broke and it seemed someone had gotten free. Alas, there would be no stick for Kevin. I saw Taro appear out of the crowd with a huge grin on his face.
“I touched it.”
“You touched it?”
“Yea.”
“What?”
“The stick. I touched it.”
“You fucking touched it?”
“Yea.”
High five.
