Sunday, February 18, 2007

Okayama Saidaiji (Hadaka Matsuri) for Chinese New Year

Happy Chinese New Year everyone. And for your information, it's the year of the boar. It doesn't even feel like CNY at all since Japan doesn't go by the lunar calendar. It also sucks that I'm not getting any money this year. But on the brighter side of things, I was able to see loads of naked men. Not a bad trade off but a little overwhelming with testosterone.
We went to the Naked Man's festival in Okayama this weekend. Even though we had to take the train for nearly 5 hrs and it never stopped raining for the whole 12 hours that we were outside for, it was still a worthwhile experience. Definitely not a part of my culture to see hundreds of nearly naked men running around at night time, all for the sake 2 batons.
So the festival participants catwalk into a bath house looking building, soak themselves wet and march right out. I don't really know why they do this though and I've sort of stopped questioning why Japanese people do what they do.

Then they march over to a shrine and wait crowd around, waiting for the baton throwing to start. I should mention that most of the time was spent waiting for the baton throwing and not the actually throwing. I never did get to see the batons though because they were really small. They should really make it glow in the dark.

Prancing in the rain with Dennis (Okayama JET). My friend Pauline had warned me that the bags we bought in Vietnam rub off dye. I sorta forgot about that and didn't think about the rain so much. 4 hours into the rain I see that my hands are all black and was like... dammit!!! As you can guess, my jacket also looks ridiculous. It had a dark grey streak all the way down on the left side and I think the damage is permanent. Reason to buy a new jacket.

Traditional fundoshi (loincloth)
Not so traditional fundoshi poses
Rows and rows of Okayama policemen. I thought this was just as worth going to the festival to see simply because there was clearly an overcrowd of policemen but they served no purpose at all. They didn't even do anything. Just stood there with no expression. Though I wasn't at home having a cozy CNY dinner with my family. It was nice to be able to eat 開年飯 with other foreigners whom Chinese New Year's actually mean something to. But still no money.

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