Preparing for Ota Festival

I climb the steps to the second floor of the town home in Yokosuka. The young puppeteer gestures towards an aluminum door adjacent to a small tatami room holding a dozen festival organizers. I open the aluminum door, and teeter over a 16 foot drop into a vacant garage. My stomach flips as I survey the drop. Soon enough I realize that this is the doorway to the top of the district’s 6 meter festival dashi; but today’s ornamental float sits in in the front yard, surrounded teenaged boys sipping ice coffee as they greet passersby. 

The puppeteer zips across the 4 x 6 mesh floor with ease, locating two large wooden crates. It's the perfect place to show off the Ota Festival Preservation Society's karakuri ningyo. Crouched inside the suspended platform, my mentor and guide, Ms. Yasuko Senda, and I explore the puppet's mechanisms and movements. The puppeteer sets the three-foot mechanical actor on the ground and gestures for us to take photographs. Yasuko-san translates:

"We used to keep this secret. But not so much anymore," he expresses with a shrug.

I notice a similar sentiment later in the day. While at rehearsal for another district's karakuri ningyo performance, Yasuko-san and I gather in a tiny rehearsal room, as puppeteers nonchalantly illustrate the karakuri ningyo's once-mysterious mechanisms.

Unlike Tahara Matsuri, where the puppets are operated by strings, these characters are manipulated through handcrafted rods, or sashigane, adorned in multi-sized hooks and sleeves. The sashigane moves in and out of the karakuri ningyo during performances, releasing or igniting the puppet's internal mechanisms. The sashigane works together with the dashi's internal framework to create these karakuri ningyo's magical robotic feats.

But knowing the secrets is inconsequential. The amount of precision, practice, and complexity I observe only further fuels my fascination.

You hook that where? And rotate it here? While guiding that? 

If anything, it appears even more impossible. In translation, the sashigane is frequently mixed-up with the English word weapon. It's quickly corrected to “rod." But rod doesn't give the tool justice. Weapon works - the shashigane is wielded with careful deliberation and power.

Back at the garage, the puppeteer's younger brothers, cousins, and friends stand around the towering float, laughing and doing their best American accents. Eight of us practice lifting the 5 ton dashi. Specific positions are called out by the group's director, and the young men move in and out of the dashi arms in synchronized efficiency, balancing the 18th century float atop our shoulders. The act of pulling the dashi is an art in itself. It requires rehearsals, dedication, and superb calf muscles.

"And this is without the musicians and team of puppeteers on board," I think, red-faced and out of breath. My mind travels to Tahara Matsuri, where a cooler of sake and cold beer followed the dashis like a golf caddy through the city streets. I hope this group has the same amenities, but I can't bet on it. It's clear Ota Festival is very different than Tahara Matsuri.

For one, the dashi looks surprisingly distinct. Built in 1826, hand-chiseled dragons in cypress wrap around the float, framing the tiers in ornamental grandeur. On the second tier, a miniature proscenium protrudes like a majestic memorial. The dashi is a temple on wheels.

In the puppeteer's cabin, a large wooden track, or toi, helps guide the karakuri ningyo puppets up and down the dashi stage. The toi can also slide across the width of the dashi, moving the puppet left to right with graceful deliberation.

Unlike Tahara, where a ladder carried me up to the second tier, climbing up Ota's dashi isn't easy. My hips lodge in-between the cypress supports as I hopelessly pull myself through the unforgiving wooden beams. The puppeteers look around nervously, unsure if they made the right decision allowing me join their rehearsal. At the top, I grip the sides tightly and let out a whimper as the float is tilted into the air and the puppeteers next to me try to recall the English phrase "scaredy cat".

The puppeteers carry the tradition in their blood. Their fathers and uncles used to ride the same dashi, skillfully manipulating sashigane from puppet to puppet. Today, the youngest puppeteer is thirteen and the oldest twenty-five. Despite their youth, they take the job seriously. As I clumsily put my shoes back on and fumble with my camera, they cluster around the majestic dashi, shouting, laughing, and calling out to their friends with an envious natural hipness. I walk away from the waving teens in disbelief: in this town, it's cool to be a puppeteer.

Tahara Matsuri

Tahara City sits at the head of Japan's Atsumi Peninsula. A two hour train ride from Nagoya Station, the city welcomes visitors with a landscape speckled with convenience stores, melon farms, and solar panels. On a typical Friday morning, traffic inches across Tahara Bay towards the second-largest Toyota manufacturing plant in Japan, as surfers head to the coast to tackle some of the most thrilling waves in the Pacific. 

However, this weekend is different. This weekend, all roads lead to the Tahara Matsuri, one of the last major summer festival in Aichi prefecture. 

Japanese festivals are distinguished by dashi, the multi-tiered floats that travel through city streets. Appearing as joyous thrones, these dashi sway above crowds of onlookers, marking the start of the weekend's festivities. Inside, musicians sit tightly packed with their instruments on the first floor, while mechanical puppets move six meters above their heads. These automated puppets, known as karakuri ningyo or "mechanical dolls," are what brings me to Tahara.

During the first quarter of the Edo Period, wooden robots carried tea across tatami floors to their masters, mechanical frogs hopped across late-night pubs with shots of sake on their backs, and festival floats were adorned with deities that transformed into dragons, orangutans, and magical carps. 

As far back as 1662, visitors to Takeda Omi's Karakuri Theater took delight in live entertainment absent of actors, dancers, or any type human flesh at all, for that matter. For over 100 years, the theater produced original plays cast entirely of mechanical actors. 

Four hundred years since these mechanical puppets first appeared on matsuri floats, they still delight thousands across Japan, performing in over 60 annual festivals. Even in permanent theaters, karakuri ningyo remains a popular attraction as robot ensembles continue to perform on rotation at the Kiryu City's Karakuri Puppet Theater and the Chiran Waterwheel Theater. The magic of these automated thespians is timeless, and their influence on Japanese culture is unmistakable. Just take a stroll down the bustling streets of Tokyo's Shibuya district, where crowds of tourists line up every night to watch a two hour dinner theater extravaganza with performing robots. 

For most of the year, each dashi hibernates in a city-sponsored garage. On the morning of the festival, the floats are released, and pulled by teams of men, teenagers, and children through the city of Tahara.

This afternoon, the three dashi converge at the festival center around 13:00, as the musicians, puppeteers, and audience prepare for the show.

Each performance is five to seven minutes long and captures a particular Japanese legend. The performances end with a cathartic transformation: a fish appears at the end of a pole, an empress is transformed into a dragon, a shinto priest releases white confetti from his wooden gohei.  

Each float has four puppeteers, with two puppeteers operating each karakuri ningyo within the secret deck. Inside, it feels like a club-house, with a few pillows and the smell of Japanese cypress. Only men are allowed up.

Following the performance, the dashi are exhibited in the festival hall, and greet the visitors from surrounding towns who have traveled to Tahara for the celebration.

I thought this was the end of the dashi. However, following the karakuri ningyo performance, music echoed down the narrow streets of Tahara. Behind the local elementary school, I saw the colorful tops of more dashi, starting and stopping, traveling in every direction.  Walking through Tahara's neighborhoods, I discovered teenagers adorned in body paint and colorful clothing pulling the floats.

On the bottom tier, young girls filled the dashi. With makeup and kimonos perfectly adorned, each girl climbs from the pit onto the stage. The audience participates, tossing coins and candy in the air.

These performances stem from weeks of preparation, and serve as a rite of passage for the participants. After the performance, the dashi continues to the next house, where it stops, and another girl steps up to perform.

In between the performances, teenage boys jump on the stage, and karaoke to J-Pop, often in zany hand-made costumes. 

At night, these traveling stages multiply once more, as Tahara's main street is transformed into a wild community performance, a sort of talent show performed at the exact same time as another talent show only 10 yards away, performed next to another talent show only 10 yards away, performed next to another talent show only 10 yards away...

Each stage has its own aesthetic style, some with multiple tiers, where technicians operate music from boomboxes, rotate makeshift disco balls and wave pulsing strobe lights. Many of these dashi have gas-powered flames, a wholly exciting flourish when accompanied by eight teenagers hanging off the sides, dancing and singing along with Japanese pop.

While I came to Tahara to experience the karakuri ningyo, its the dashi that left me with a lasting impression. The festival reframes many Western concepts of a stage, and transforms it into something that is ubiquitous, sacred, and accessible all at once. The design of these floats draws from the style of the traditional karakuri ningyo dashi seen earlier in the day; however, that traditional appearance is invigorated with the makeshift charm of christmas lights, kitsch, found objects, and untamed dancing. 

On the final day of the festival, hunabi is the word. Community members clasp enormous smoking fireworks as offerings at the local shinto shrine. In the evening, an unbelievable firework display lights up the night sky for over two hours. Chocolate bananas are served under tents and the McDonalds has a line out the door.

The community of Tahara is excited to share their history with visitors. They are also thrilled to show off an amazing eco-friendly electrical grid. Solar panels and wind mills dot the landscape, hugged by the Atsumi Bay and Pacific Ocean. At the top of the Mt. Zao, a giant turbine reminds visitors that almost 30 percent of the homes in Tahara are powered by renewable energy.

The observatory on Mt. Zao has a glow-in-the-dark celestial path that leads up to a sleek yogurt shop. It's the perfect place to enjoy the fireworks and watch Tahara's matsuri traditions as summer loosens its grip on the region.