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Summer is festival season in Japan, and the Osaka area has two of the country’s the most famous matsuri. July’s Tenjin Matsuri takes place in downtown Osaka, along the banks of the Tosabori river. While the raucous passage of boats carrying portable mikoshi shrines is a marvellous spectacle, huge crowds mean Tenjin Matsuri is a sweat-fest and claustrophic’s nightmare.
More interesting is the Kishiwada Danjiri Matsuri. About thirty minutes by train to Osaka’s blue-collar south, the festival involves around 35 wheeled danjiri – wheeled mikoshi – being pulled around the town at pace. Originally a harvest festival, the Danjiri Matsuri has evolved over three hundred years in to a show of endurance, strength and celebration.
Each shrine takes about 200 children and men to get moving, and – this being Japan – the line-up is strictly hierarchical. Youngsters at the front of the rope, followed by high school kids who – just in case they don’t pull hard enough – are whipped with paper fans by their peers, running beside them screaming encouragement.
On the danjiri stand stern-faced greybeards and other assorted dignitaries, while dancing the hikouki-nori (aeroplane dance) atop – a tough ask on the fast-moving shrine - is the top dog of the community.
Running behind each of the danjiri is a motley group of about a hundred hangers-on, who sprint and shout, puffing and huffing to keep up. The atmosphere of the town is transformed for three days, the streets filled with the shouts and screams of the crowd, the high-pitched call of pipes and the low thuds of taiko drums.
For the Japanese – by themselves often taciturn and reluctant to indulge in public outpourings of emotion - such matsuri allow the opportunity to let off steam. To see the transformation from reticent weekday salaryman to high-spirited, passionate participant in the matsuri is to see the real soul of Japan.
