Our friends flew into Tokyo to meet us there at the beginning of a long weekend created by some Japanese holiday whose characters directly translate as "Filial Piety Day" by my reading but are more traditionally rendered as "Respect for the Aged Day". The plan was for Ana and I to take an evening train from Kanazawa to Tokyo, sleep at the school's condo, and meet them at the airport when they arrived at the crack of dawn. The first hint we had that this plan was not going to work was when we arrived at the station and saw...
... enormously long lines going into the ticketing and customer service area. A typhoon had rolled through the day before, and though it hadn't hardly rained any more than usual here, apparently the damage was severe enough in some places to cut the Shinkansen (bullet train) service we had tickets for. Or there was some other problem which we were unaware of. Either way, we were not able to take our scheduled train. We had good reason to be in Tokyo the next morning earlier rather than later, aside from simply meeting our friends at the airport, and so we were quite concerned while waiting in line for a ticket agent to give us a verdict. It turned out that the only way for us to get to Tokyo early enough to work for our schedule was the night train, which was a heck of a lot better than nothing, but for one thing didn't leave for most of four hours and for another meant we would not have time to sleep anywhere but on the train before launching into the first real day of the trip.
So we waited in their silly little waiting room, and got a lot of knitting of yarn and reading of books done...
...and then basically had our own car on the night train. We had to be in Tokyo early, so we were glad to achieve that even if it meant sleeping sitting up in a well-lit train car. We got some sleep, at least.
When we arrived in Tokyo at about 6AM, we split up and Ana went to go get in line while I went to Haneda Airport to meet our jet-lagged friends and bring them directly to the venue where Ana was waiting for us. We stashed their bags in Shinjuku Station (where Ana had stashed ours earlier - there was no time to take them to the condo) and hurried onward. I may have done some navigation that was not, strictly speaking, on the route I'd planned, and as time was getting short, I accidentally left my umbrella against a lamppost after examining my map. We arrived with less than five minutes before the start of what we'd come to see, just before 10AM.
The thing that made this mad dashing about worthwhile was the rare opportunity to see yabusame performed, which is a Shinto ceremony based around a display of skills in horse archery. It is performed for viewers probably fewer than ten times a year, and we had been very excited to find a chance to see it that we were actually able to take. Heck of a way to start off a trip to Japan, no? The yabusame we went to see was actually a starter event for a large all-day festival dedicated to horses, and we'd only found out about it a few weeks beforehand.
Ana had arrived hours earlier in the
vanguard, and so we had a blanket laid out in prime territory instead of
being exiled to the far end of the course with those without the
determination to get up and show up so early. The sides of the course had a number of tiers, so once things started all we had to do was stand up and we could see the action quite well. In the meantime, we had brought along some breakfast items.
In a yabusame ceremony, there are three targets like the one above spaced down a track, and the idea is to gallop along the track and try to hit the three targets with arrows. Our sources indicate that this is not easy to do. There were a number of Shinto priests around, and some ceremonial aspects performed by them at the start, but mostly we were there for the horse archery part of it and I think that could be said of most of the crowd.
After some ceremonializing, the various yabusame practitioners passed in review and did a few warmup runs down the track to get a feel for it, before the arrows started flying.
Yabusame is traditionally done in the garb of the Heian period, which I believe was around 1100-1200AD. It certainly adds to the pageantry. Soon enough, they got down to business. Riders go one at a time and the three judges at each station are there to judge if the arrow hits or not and must be mildly uncomfortable as men with enormous bows fire arrows right past them.
We enjoyed watching the different riders test their luck, and since I'm pretty sure there were fewer than ten total runs the event ran as scheduled for a mere half an hour. Being late would have been a real problem, and we were very glad to have made things work out to be able to see it.
After the ceremony was finished, we patronized some of the many food stalls that had been set up nearby. I got an honestly barbequed chicken quarter from a stall named "Texas" which was delicious and well worth the five bucks, while our friends tried steamed pork buns and the ever-popular meat-on-a-stick. This left us fairly well fortified to pursue our day of adventure, but we ran into a Freshness Burger on the way back and got some of that too, just to be sure.
And wouldn't you know it, my umbrella was right were I left it, an hour or so later.
Next up, in the afternoon of the very same day, SUMO. The hits just keep on coming! Tune in next time for that as well as our visit to Fukushima*.
*OK, we didn't actually go to the Fukushima, for those who can't handle the suspense.
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