Onbashira-ma!

My first matsuri would turn out to be a good one. Pretty simple recipe. You take a handful of trees, about 100 guys, a big ass hill and you've basically got the first 2 weekends of Onbashira. Then you spread it out, so it happens only once every seven years or so. . .and next thing you know, you got about 100,000 people showing up at your doorstep.

Our visit to Shimosuwa in the Nagano prefecture turned out to be quite short. We opted to go by local train and take advantage of the 18Kippu. Basically a 1 day all you can ride pass on the JR lines. Hide searched the internet and found a good seller, saving us at least $100 in travel expenses. See there's more to the internet than just porn!!

The weather was pretty much perfect. A sunny 24 degrees. . .not too hot, not too cool. We treked about 30mins to get to the hill but found ourselves unable to get anywhere near the hill. The festival itself was very commercial. There were pamphlets at local train stops on the way, and about 100 or so little booths and stands selling drinks, food, onbashira shirts, photos, toys. . .you name it. They even had a television crew on the hill. The signal was sent to about 5 different moving trucks with massive lcd displays on the sides. We didn't know that to get close to the hill, you needed to buy a ticket. =(

But I was determined to go further. We followed some folks up the side of the hill and descended down, parallel to the slope where the logs were getting hauled. Pretty sketchy. At one point, near the bottom of the hill, there was a cry from up above. Hide turned to see a good 60-100lb rock hurdling down the hill. It missed her by about 2 inches, then took an elder lady's legs out from under her. She flew about 2m in the air and then rolled down the slope for another 5m or so. . . Couldn't believe she got up with no real injuries. She said she bruised her butt, and lucky that was all. So after squirming our way through the crowd, we eventually got a decent spot to watch some carnage. We only caught about 10 mins in all, but it was enough for one guy to get severely crippled. Apparently no one died this year =D

We then snuck under the orange tape and on to the actual hill itself. It was steep. Those guys are nuts. Funny cuz there were about 5 police officers saying "stay behind the orange tape please". But absolutely no one was listening to them. Guess they don't have the pepper spray like the RCMP.

We had prime positions for the next session, but a short delay turned into a long delay. It was too late and we probably would have gotten stranded. Zannen da ne! Oh well. . .still good times.

So I guess its time for a break from traveling. Spending a little too much money than I should be.

In other news, I'm heading to HK and Tokyo during Golden Week. Should be a blast. Gonna head up to visit Hide's oldest sister in Tokyo for 3-4 days and then I'm jetting to HK to meet my folks for another 3-4 days. Then back to Tokyo and bussing back to Nagoya. I lucked out on this one, as my folks agreed to pay for the flight.

So since my departure from Van, I've officially been to Nagoya, Fukuoka, Osaka, Shimosuwa and Gifu. Soon enough Tokyo and HK. Kyoto, Nara, Okinawa and Hokkaido are definately on the checklist, plus anywhere else that time and money allow.