Naked Man festival

Now THIS is what I call a festival.
On Saturday night we went up to Kui (like a shortened version of “coo-ee!”), a little township up in the mountains about half an hour away from our place. Kui is where Yusuke’s wife Yoko hails from (and where we bought our car, since her family runs the local car yard Ito Motors).
Yoko was involved in organising the Naked Man festival this year and invited us to come up and have a look.
And what a great festival it was too: semi-naked men running through the streets, lots of water and splashing, massed crowds of onlookers, stalls selling the usual tasty goods, and to finish with a massive all-in brawl by the naked (and now very drunk) men — all in good fun of course.
I wasn’t able to determine the cultural significance of men running around in the freezing cold in nothing but loincloths and I suspect most of the onlookers wouldn’t know either, but the modern Japanese aren’t about to let a bit of cultural ambiguity stand in the way of a good festival.

The order of events is as follows: first of all the naked men all assemble at the ancient traditional cultural 7-11 at the bottom (geddit?) end of town.

Then they head up the road chanting and carrying a tub of something on a podium, stopping along the way to drink copious amounts of sake kindly put out by shops and houses en route.

When they get to the river, they all jump in and splash about for a bit, then jump out again five minutes later. Bear in mind that the ambient temperature is something below zero at this stage.

Finally they head up to the local shrine where they hang about in the freezing cold waiting for all the other Naked Men to join them from various other places. Some of them come all the way over from the parallel NM festival at Okayama, about an hour and a half away up the road (which incidentally is documented in the excellent book by Brian Thacker called The Naked Man Festival).

The festival culminates in a massive bunfight whereby a couple of hundred naked men are fighting for a little bit of red stick that is thrown down from above. There’s a reason for this of course; the little red bit of stick is worth about $1000.  There was lots of pushing and shoving but nobody got hurt and it was all very cultural.

So we’ll be going back next year for sure, but I reckon I’ll be wearing another couple of layers; it was sooooooo cold up at the shrine. And when I got home, still frozen to the bone, I celebrated with the ultimate luxury: a nice long shower. Because there are no water restrictions in Japan. Yet.

Click here for more photos.