Last weekend, I took part in the Hadaka Matsuri in Okayama. This is a men-only festival that is fun and crazy (women can watch but as the details come forth, you’ll realize that it’s impractical for women to partake). I have no idea how a festival like this would start, but I kind of have an idea. Before we get into specifics, I’d like to lay out a general outline of what this is.

At the strike of midnight four priests throw four sticks into a mass of people. One of the sticks is worth $200,000. The other three are just sticks. The person that gets the stick out of one of four gates wins. It’s that simple. Now, let’s go into details.

Imagine a square, two story building in the middle of a large octogon, dirt field. The building is circumferenced by a stage about 10 feet wide. The stage is about four or five feet high. The building itself has no openings on the first floor (that I could see, and I only saw one side). The second floor is completely open. The roof slants down and extends to the edge of the stage. We good there?

The next part, we’ll describe the participants (me). The name of the festival “Hadaka” is actually a misnomer. No one is actually hadaka. Everyone is wearing a fundoshi (active link. WARNING: Not for the week of heart). To put on a fundoshi (WARNING actually hadaka men alert). is not easy or comfortable. I don’t know about you, but I don’t know how to tie one (but I want to look it up and learn. Who knows, oneday civilization might die and I’ll be on an island and need to wear one or something).

To put mine on, I did what the other billion foreigners did: ask an exahsperated Japanese dude to tie it for me. I felt sorry for them as there was a long line of hadaka foreigners waiting for the Japanese guy to fondle the family jewels. Aside from the fundoshi, all we “wore” were tabi (which give a whole new meaning to camel toe).

After doning our gear, we hit the streets for a nice jog. By nice, I mean it’s 10PM on a brisk night in February. In almost every Japanese festival, the word to scream is “Washoi”. It means “Washoi”. So, we ran through the streets looking at all the people nicely bundled up in heavy coats, sipping coffee or some sort of alcoholic beverage. That was the nice part of the run.

Japanese police are serious about their crowd control. Approaching the temple The streets were lined with two rows of cops making sure the hadaka people and the non-hadaka people didn’t get in each other’s way. Then, when we entered the giant field of the building described above, for each spectator in the stands surrounding it there was three cops. Cops cops cops everywhere.

The nice people of the law enforcement guided us to the next place in our little run. See because we were running, we might have broken into a sweat, so we next ran into a waist deep pool of water. I was fine with taht as I’d lost most of the feeling in my legs, however, my torso was still some how living. That’s why it was so fun when everyone started splashing each other as we ran through, it killed of the rest of the feeling in my body.

From the pool we ran to the stage. We got there pretty early, so we were able to get right up in the front. Everyone continued shouting “Washoi” and running in place so we wouldn’t keel over in ice blocks. From the second floor, the priest ever so graciously threw water down on us to make sure we wouldn’t get too warm.

While jogging in place, I looked at the other fool-hearty people around me, including the 7 or so japanese dudes standing on some sort of ledge under the building. All of them were rather muscular and the one on the end closest to where I was kept playing with his mouth guard. Needless to say, that freaked me out and I moved to the other side of the stage. As I mentioned, we were early. On the side of the stage where we were on, there was maybe 70 people. about half an hour later, there were 170, about 11:30 is when the mass of people came.

I knew that there’d be somewhere between 7 and 9,000 people there so I hung back away from the middle with one of my friends. Then, there was a rush of about 100 people or so up to the middle that I got stuck in. In that rush, might right tabi started to fall off and I could kind of bend down and take it completely off and stick it in my fundoshi. I hoped there would be some point were I could actually put it back on. However, for the next 20 min I concentrated on one thing: moving my lungs.

Everyone wanted to be in the middle where the stick would be thrown. So there was lots and lots of pushing and shoving. Having lost a tabi I was very wary of being stepped on as the dirt and water we’d run through turned everyone into living sand paper. However, on the plus side I was no longer cold. In fact I was quite the opposite. 2 to 300 people crammed into a tiny space, pushing back and forth, individuals un able to move, it makes you hot, and then the guy next to you hot and you start to sweat that cold water off and your sweat too until there’s this over hanging cloud of steam. At that point you start to wonder why that damn priest won’t throw MORE water on you. What’s wrong? No bucket?!?! Anway. I generally would just lift my feet and avoid the stamping. But I still got stomped on some and my ankle was kind of bloody when I finally got out.

I wasn’t the only person to start freaking out. I went from being on the edge, to the middle middle to back to the edge and back to the middle. We were a sea of people. When the flow was on the other side, I could sort of squeeze my way out towards the edge. When I was about four rows of people from the edge, a new fear entered my head: I’m going to get shove off. There was no way I wanted to go back in, which ment forcing myself out. Fortunately (?) at that time, our buddies the police started shoving through the crowd to get someone for some reason. I couldn’t seee why, but it stopped the flow and I was able to squeeze my self out that last little bit.

Upon first leaving the herd, I noticed how cold it was; I was no longer encased in warm flesh. I stood and watched the writhe for awhile. I didn’t see anyone fall off, but there reports that many people did. There was several hundred people standing in the cortyard just looking at the sea of people on the stage. I joined the spectators for a bit and then looked at the pillar next to me. It was covered on the stage side in pillows, remembering the mouthguard dude, I decided that wasn’t the best place to stand either, so I moved further into the cold.

Shortly after I got out, two more foreigners squeezed out. Both of them had lost both of their tabis. They seemed to have not lift their feet during the ebb and flow and had bloody stumps attached to their legs (It wasn’t taht bad, but it was pretty red). They wanted no part in standing and watching and they turned and started walking to the tent.

I’d like to tell you that I stayed and ignored the cold, that I stayed 5 more minutes and watched the lights go out and not see, in the darkness, the priests throw the sticks out. Then I’d like to tell you that I saw many people having their fundoshi (which is less comfortable wearing normally than an “atomic” wedgie) pulled and yanked. I’d like to say that I watched the police pull people off the guys with the sticks because they were getting beat so badly. But that wasn’t me, that was one of my friends that saw all that. All I saw was the warmness of my clothes and the comfort of a beer with two guys who I’d never seen before. However, by leaving early, I did miss the rush back to the changing tents and was able to change in relative ease.

Brian Schuch