Okunchi

Nagasaki was host to the Okunchi festival this past weekend. During Okunchi six towns around Nagasaki are chosen to practice and perform a dance, but these aren't just any old dances; and this isn't just any old festival. Most of the dances and displays are practiced for six months or more and involved elaborate floats (which are usually ridden by children, and pushed around by men) and story-telling. The towns chosen to participate are very honored and must wait a cycle of seven years to be involved.

There are four or five venues around Nagasaki where over a three day period these dances are performed, and judged, in front of an audience. Tickets are usually quite hard to come by, but I was lucky enough to get some for the Sunday morning performance.

These kids performed a dance as two Dutch comedians. Apparently, long ago when Nagasaki was the only port in Japan opened for outside trading, there was actually a duo of Dutch dudes who went door to door performing a comedy routine. These little versions were followed up by their adult counterparts.

Every town invited to participate, started their performance with the display, spinning and twirling of this large, round curtain-like floats. One man carried the beastly thing around and showed off their balance. I thought I overheard that they weighed close to 170kilos, but I'm not sure. They're heavy anyway.

Here men push and pull on one of the many boat floats involved in the festival. It's hard to see here, but there are about ten children riding in the float, all playing drums. The floats were loaded onto some kind of wheels, but when demanded to, the men would push the float into every which direction. (The wheels weren't rotating so they left deep scratches in the cement when the float was rotated 360 degrees.)

The last, and most impressive, float was a whale which spouted water. I heard from teachers at school after the festival that someone was actually riding inside the whale using some kind of pumping mechanism to send water 30 feet in the air. It was amazing.

And, as with any festival in Japan, Okunchi came all jumbled up with food stalls and vendors pushing trinkets. Families could feed their faces with festival food like yakitori and okonomiyaki and kids could walk home with baby chicks, goldfish, water filled balloon yo-yos on rubber bands, or their favorite anime character's mask.