On purification rituals and running around in your shorts

SATURDAY, 14 JANUARY 2012 - DONTOSAI FESTIVAL

Ok, so I've been sitting on this post for two weeks.  I'm not one to make New Year's Resolutions, preferring the more short term approach of "Claudine, we need to do something about (insert self-destructive/ lazy behaviour here); totally commit to the change for a week; tell everyone how amazing it is to live life this way; get bored by Day 11 and realize that it really doesn't matter if I'm skinny enough to fit into a Japanese small or that I quite like waking up to dishes scattered all around my apartment".  However, I did mentally promise myself that I would spend less time watching Castle and more time keeping this up to date.  Although it was never an official Declaration, it was a mental pinkie swear and I've been feeling bad about it.  I guess I was hoping that a spectacular perspective about this experience, glittering with wit and intelligence, would produce itself, but it hasn't.  I'm starting to feel like my Comic Zing Generator is  depressed.  She needs company to bounce around with and that's not always easy.  One of my banter partners is hiding under the covers at the moment and although there are several witty people within the little community I live in, sometimes your respective Comic Zing Generators just don't match up and it feels less like banter and more like waiting for the other person to finish proving how fucking intelligent they are, rather than just having a conversation involving both parties and seeing what gems they can co-create.

Whew!  Woo!  Sorry, to have ranted all over you.   Back to this festival thing.  Dontosai is the festival where peeps take their New Year's decorations to their nearest shrine and burn them in the communal fire.
Part of the festivities include a pilgrimage in which participants walk to the shrine dressed in skimpy clothing in the name of purification.  For the past two years, our board of education has been gregarious enough to allow the foreign teachers join in.  Last year, I was too cool for school to join in and regretted it.   This time around I decided to stop the silliness.

Warning: this post might include some moaning about how cold it was (What did you expect, Claudine, running around in minus weather in the equivant of gym shorts and a bathrobe?), that doesn't mean I'm not glad I did it.  I'm not saying that there aren't better ways to spend a Saturday night, but this one gets super awesome points for originality!

4pm We had to arrive ridiculously early to put on a pair of shorts and kimono.  When you have to wrap 10 m of cotton around your waste, 2 hrs suddenly becomes a fairly reasonable amount of prep time.

Everyone was layering sneaky thermal underwear and heating pads where they could hide them.  At first this felt like cheating, after 3hrs in the cold, it was the only sign of sanity.

Ooh!  Look at that super flattering ensemble!  

Practical footgear!

Pre-departure, when we still had the energy to smile.

Walking down the street to the shrine.  We got lots of gawking for being foreigners doing this.  At this point, I was trying to be all zen and use the ritual as a meditation exercise, where you observe your discomfort rather than try to ignore it.  However, after two hours , taking my attention to my feet that were on fire just made me want to throw up.

I discussed this ritual with someone back home who asked, "Why do people in cold places feel the need to prove how much cold they can withstand?"  The pilgrimage is a purification ritual (part of why we were in the cold for three times the amount of time we were supposed to be was because there were so many people there this year- no doubt a result of last year's earthquake).  Although the whole thing now means a zen-ish ritual, I suspect that it may have been a purification of the gene pool - make them run around in silly outfits, if they don't die of hypothermia, they can move onto spring and the joys Hanami and hormones bring.

It's also a ritual of perspective.  I think it's safe to say that that night was the coldest I'd ever been.  The silly little heating pads were useless.  I thought the pain in my feet would eventually go from sever icy burn to numbness, but it never did.  By the time I got back to the school where we had gotten changed, my knees were blue.  Sure, my first winter here, I thought I felt as cold, as I sat beneath my kotatsu, wearing three layers of thermals and building my natural heating system with large doses of melted cheese.  How wrong I was!  When you've run around the streets in minus weather, you understand that the rest of the time, you just think you're cold.  It could be far, far worse*.

*In fact, Claudine is now often able to walk around without a hat or gloves, something she would never have attempted before.  She even states that she now wears fewer layers and it no longer bothers her when her shitty sneakers get soaked by mushy snow.  Of course, she should just buy better sneakers.