Sunday, April 5, 2009

Hanami, Penis Festivals and Me

It's beautiful. It's iconically Japanese. It's more season-specific than going to the beach or going skiing, much to the dismay of every Japanese poet, ever. It's Hanami.

Hanami (hana = flower, mi = viewing) is a solely Japanese past time. And it's an enjoyable one at that. For a week or two every spring, the sakura (cherry tree) offers up it's momentary bounty of wonderful light-pink/almost-white flowers. In a park area with hundreds of sakura trees, it can turn the low horizontal band of the sky a pinkish white, completely altering the park, turning it into a surreal, cartoon-Heaven-like atmosphere.

The cherry blossom stands in for Japan as an international symbol, as well as a poetic metaphor, and it is rivalled only by the chrysanthemum, the imperial flower, in these capacities (though, imperial regalia has lost most of it's national importance after WWII). Poets have focused on the temporal nature of the surreal atmosphere which heralds the official defeat of winter. The flowers fragility, transient nature and light colors clearly illustrate the Japanese aesthetic of appreciating the full beauty of nature; in both it's apex and decline. The keshiki (view) is wonderful, but so is the idea that hanami exists in a specific moment in time, and must be enjoyed on its own time; often blooming for only a week to ten days.

For hundreds of years, hanami has served as a kind of seasonal picnic for the Japanese. And if hanging out in a warm, Heaven-like environment doesn't sound good enough, add alcohol. Sometimes, I love the Japanese way of doing things. I've heard stories about the rookies in corporate offices staking out the best places in Yoyogi Park (akin to New York's Central Park), in the early hours of the morning, and simply staying on a tarp all day until their bosses and coworkers come to drink after work. It's that important. And while that story was told to me with an air that such expectations of social inferiors are unreasonable ... it would be hard for me to be angry about being ordered to sit in a beautiful park all day, waiting for the booze to arrive and enjoying nature in the meantime.

My Tokyo friends and I did hanami Saturday night, and it was wonderful. Although I couldn't really see very far because of the darkness, we were underneath a tree whose white flowers contrasted with everything else around us. It's strange for me to describe, because there's nothing similar back home. It's as if everything is covered in snow, but it's not cold, and all the snow smells like cherries, and sometimes the breeze will send some of the petals showering down on us.

Of course, there were a lot of other Gaijin doing the same thing; quite a lot of tourists, too, which provided some cringe-worthy reminders of what Americans can be like on vacation. It was still wonderful, though. Someone was throwing a techno dance party 50 yards away, there was all kinds of carnival food, and plenty of beer. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera, though I suspect I can get my friends' shots of the night.


And then the Penis Festival. Masturi (festivals) are incredibly important for Japanese cities. Every Japanese city is "famous" for something, and it usually has a seasonal festival. My city prides itself on it's strawberries, and the shinto shrines probably put on some kind of strawberry festival to bring a few tourists into the city, but also to have a banner of some kind to unite the city under; to give it some kind of identity.

And the city I went to you prides itself on it's penis identity, I suppose. There is an old story about the origins of the Penis Matsuri, which, though I'd love to relate to you in my own words, is probably best for you to read on Wikipedia ... just so you believe me. Wiener. There you are. I particularly liked the transexual men carrying the giant pink penis up and down the street while dolled up in drag. Man, if I knew it was gonna be that kind of party, I would've shown up drunk.

In any case, it was a really wonderful day, full of (extremely predictable) dick jokes, and phallus-shaped novelty foods. "Would you like a sausage?" "Can I get you some meat on a stick?" "Would you care for a penis-shaped lollipop?" I bought several of each. The only trouble with eating a lollipop shaped like a penis is that ... it's shaped like a penis. So, I can't really eat it in public, and I feel a little awkward about eating it in private; it's like I'm doing something dirty! I ate one at the festival, because hey, the atmosphere was pretty accepting. It was extremely off-putting, however, to see small children eating them. I understand that kids like suckers, and I understand that, as Freud could claim, "sometimes a sucker is just a sucker," but it made me uncomfortable.

In any case, I have a handful of penis-shaped lollipops. I affectionately call them cocksuckers.

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