I ❤ Gion Matsuri

I've written about Gion Matsuri before.  Each year I grow more fond of this month-long annual festival in the heart of Kyoto.

Gion Matsuri is summer.  It is summer in Kyoto.  It is hot as hell.  It is crowded.  It is wonderfully and unassumingly exuberant, and somewhat mystifying.  Everyone dressed in yukata and geta, glistening with sweat, uchiwa waving, beating at the warm, moist air like the wings of a bug caught in a swimming pool.

It is a sort of joyous suffering, like over-drinking on a night out.  Just as you know that last drink is too much, that you'll pay for it, everyone knows Gion Matsuri takes place in the summer, and summer in Kyoto is generally brutal.  Still they come.  Not a couple hundred people, but thousands, streaming through the hot, sticky afternoons and evenings.

It is not like a large crowd packing into a stadium on a hot day to see a sporting event.  Gion Matsuri is fluid.  There is movement.  Movement spread over nearly 10 square kilometres.  Movement spread over 31 days.  There is a rhythm to the festival, a beat.  Like a piece of music, there is a pianissimo intro and outro, and a crescendo in the middle.  The soundtrack is a beautifully discordant and somber march of flutes, gongs and drums.  The tempo is like a New Orleans funeral parade that carries you along, but doesn't ask too much.  It is sedate, languid, perfectly in sync with the sultry weather.

For a gaijin Gion Matsuri feels thoroughly Japanese, authentic and undefiled.  Kyoto city is ever evolving.  I am witness to the constant and rapid changes.  Gion Matsuri functions in some way as an annual reminder of the city's past, of its roots.  The summer sun burns this into the hearts of its people, as well as the hordes of tourists, which ensures its continuation.  Long live Gion Matsuri!