On the one year anniversary of last year's disaster, Megan and I decided to head to Mt. Takao to the Annual Fire Walking Festival. The Yakuoin Temple holds this festival each year to pray for the safety of families. Mt. Takao is close to Tokyo and easily accessible by train. In fact, I was here last year for a dinner on the viewing platform on top of the mountain.
While living in Japan, I have to learn how to get around, which can be really tricky. As Megan and I were trying to figure out which way to go, we saw this small sign. Easy to pass by, but we chose to take a chance and follow the sign of fire. Thankfully, it took us to the correct place.
We arrived just in time for a procession through the town. This included monks, common folks, and religious leaders. It was interesting to see all the different costumes and the maturity of the participants.
The parade seemed to continue for a long time. Each group of people were wearing something different. I'm not sure what that means, but it made watching it very interesting.
I am assuming that this man in orange was the most important person. Someone was holding an umbrella over his head throughout the entire parade and his outfit was the most lavish.
Here he is with a young boy. They led the others in chants and prayers while lighting candles and incense at the local temple on the base of the mountain.
These men were playing conch shell horns to accompany the chants. I love the sounds of the buddhist chants with the horns. It gives me goose bumps every time.
After the chanting was complete at the temple, we headed to the field where the pallets were set up for the ceremony. I was surprised with the sheer number of spectators at the festival. We were packed into every crevice and hillside surrounding the platform. The platform of greenery was made from wooden frames and pallets covered in branches that looked like junipers.
Before anything could happen, the monks performed many different symbolic acts. They took turns chanting at the four corners of the pallet. It seemed to me that they were acting out scenes from different religious stories, but of course, I didn't understand a word of it. They did several scenes with axes, staffs, and arrows. As seen below, a monk is preparing to fire one of four divine arrows. Each arrow is fired at a corner of the pallet and is thought to ward of devils at the sacred fire.
After all the scenes were acted out, they lit the fire. At first, it just smoked. I could hear the crackling of the moisture in the twigs as the fire was trying to burn. At one point, the smoke was so heavy that I couldn't even see the crowd on the entire side of the mountain across from me. The smoke out continued for at least 20 minutes. I'm just glad that we didn't decide to get a spot on the other side. I don't think the "I hate white rabbit" saying would have kept this smoke away from me.
All of a sudden, the smoke just cleared and the flames roared from the pallets. They made the air so blistering hot that I had to turn away.
Here, you can see that the branches have burned away and the fire is working on the wooden structure. It burned like this for almost an hour.
Before the festival, people write their prayers on wooden tablets called Nadegi. After the fire has burned down a bit, the Yamabushi monks throw these sticks on the fire. Since there are thousands of them, it took quite awhile to get them all on the fire and burned down.
Once the fire has been lit and the smoke clears, the monks stoke the fire and douse it with water in order to quell it. This process takes well over an hour. You can see how hot it burns as the monks have to turn away from the flames with sweat dripping from their faces.
Here's where the funny story starts. Megan and I had been there and watched and waited for more than 3 hours at this point. We were tired and sore from standing in one place the entire time. It was taking forever for the flames to die down, and we thought that since there were still flames dancing around, we had time to walk across the street to use the restroom and get some food and water. Seriously, we were in the 7-11 for no more than 10 minutes when we saw flocks of people rushing past the windows. We went outside and saw that the monks had already walked across and now only the public was following suit. I couldn't believe that we had waited all that time and missed the main event. Well, that just means that next year I will make it to the end of the ceremony and be first in line to walk across myself!
After all the prayers, the Yamabashi or practicing monks walk barefoot across the smoldering ashes. They are chanting as the flames continue to dance around them. After the ashes have cooled considerably, the crowd can walk across too.
I really wanted to do it, but as you can see, the lines were quite long. After more than 3 hours there waiting and the disappointment of missing the monks walking, I was ready to go. Until next year...
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