Greetings readers and welcome back! I know it has been a while since I last wrote, but life has been a bit busy, and I haven’t had much that I felt like writing about until now. I’ve been in Japan for 6 months now, which is crazy when I think about it. Time sure is flying by! I had a nice little break from school when I went home to the US for Christmas. I thankfully got to see my whole family and spent lots of time with them, my pets, and some friends. It definitely went by way too fast and now I’m back in Japan (well, I’ve been back for a few weeks by now). Anyways, I finally got my act together and decided to sit down and write about something fun I did two weekends ago. I present to you: the Togakushi Fire Festival.
Ever since I arrived in Japan, I had been hearing about fire festivals and how cool they are. They are pretty common here in Japan, so I figured I would hit one up eventually. Some friends and I were going to go to a cool one in October, but it ended up being cancelled because of the huge typhoon that came in that weekend. That typhoon actually caused a lot of damage in a part of my prefecture because it caused levies to break on a river. It was pretty bad. Anyways, it was finally time to go to one of these cool festivals I had been hearing about.
Togakushi is close to Nagano City, so I made plans to meet up with a couple friends and stay the night in the city. I ended up discovering that I could have been traveling to Nagano City much more efficiently when making plans to potentially carpool. Previously, I had been getting to Nagano City by driving to my friend’s house in another town (a 40 minute drive away), then taking the train to the city (another 45 minutes). In looking at the driving routes, I found out that it only takes an hour to by car from my village to the city. Honestly it probably costs the same in gas to just go directly to the city, versus driving to another town and taking the train. From now I think that I will start driving and save myself the hassel!
I ended up driving myself up to the city because we needed an extra vehicle to take some other friends to the festival. Once I arrived, I met up with some friends for ramen. I was so glad when they suggested ramen, because I had been craving it. Honestly, ramen is probably my favorite food here, and I’m not talking about the ramen packets you make in the microwave. Fresh ramen is heavenly. Anyways, after lunch we went to my friend Lexi’s to park our cars and drop off our stuff, then we went to do some shopping.
Once we had completed our shopping, we went to grab dinner. We decided on omu-rice, which is essentially a thin, lightly cooked omelette with rice inside and some sort of sauce on top. Usually, its a ketchup or demi-glace sauce. It’s quite delicious.
After dinner we met up with some other friends, then headed off to Togakushi. The drive was ok, but I’m not a big fan of driving up mountains in the dark. We had to drive up some fairly steep switchback roads, but thankfully the roads were clear. I would not want to drive on those in snow, especially going downhill. After driving to the wrong location in Togakushi, we were directed to the correct spot, which was a little away from the main ski resort.
The festival was centered around a big pyre that had a bunch of doll head things called daruma. According to what my friend told me and some internet research, when you buy a daruma at a temple, you take it home and make a wish and color in the left eye of the doll. When your wish is fulfilled, you fill in the other eye. At the end of the year, you bring the dolls to the temple and they burn them. I am assuming that that is what all the dolls were on the pyre. These type of fire festivals are common at the beginning of the year and symbolize cleansing.
We arrived a bit late, so we missed the initial lighting of the pyre, but we arrived when it really started blazing. A lot of people were gathered around the fire watching, and they were doing some sort of announcement, which I didn’t understand as it was in Japanese. After watching the fire for a bit, we saw that they were handing out free cups of sake, which I sadly did not get to enjoy. Japan has extremely strict drinking and driving laws, so you can’t have any alcohol and drive. So alas, I did not get to partake. Once my friends got their sake, we watched the fire a bit more. I was amazed at how hot it was. We were probably standing 10 feet away and it felt like my face was burning. However, on a cold winter night, it did keep us nice and warm.
The festival also had free amazake and mochi, which I believe is common to festivals like that. Amazake is a sweet, fermented rice drink. The taste was pretty good, but I didn’t love it because there were small bits of rice in it. If y’all know me, you know I’m a big texture person, so chunky/pulpy drinks aren’t really my thing. We also snagged some of the mochi, which I was also not a big fan of. I don’t mind flavored mochi, but the plain kind is not my thing.
While we snacked we watched some taiko drumming and fireworks, then discovered that the festival had an adorable mascot! Japan sure loves having mascots for places, and they are usually all pretty cute. This one was no exception. We went total gaijin (foreigners) and snagged a picture with him. A small crowd of Japanese people watched us, and my friend heard them comment that it was amazing that a group of foreigners would visit for this. Little do they know that we all live here, haha.
The last cool part of the festival was when they gave out mochi on long bamboo sticks. We got excited and thought they were giving out marshmallows to roast, then realized that: 1. We are in Japan 2. This is sort of a ceremonial event and 3. That they don’t really eat marshmallows here so it’s probably mochi as part of the ceremony. I was a bit disappointed at that. They didn’t end up having enough for everyone, so we only got a few, which was fine since I didn’t want one anyways. I did try a bit of my friends’ but I couldn’t have eaten one of my own.
The mochi roasting rounded out the festival, so after hanging out by the fire a bit longer (which was still incredibly hot), we decided to head back to the city. We ended our night with a little trip to Mr. Donut, which is basically the Dunkin’ Donuts of Japan. After our little late night snack, we headed back to Lexi’s to hit the hay.
All in all, it was a pretty cool event. The fire kept us nice and warm in the cold, and it was cool to see everything all lit up in the snow. Japan has such cool traditions, so I am definitely looking forward to discovering some more cool ones! As always, thanks for reading! See ya next time!
Gitta Across the Globe 