Understanding The Local Identity through Yamakasa Walk

From the Yamakasa Walk, I really amazed about the local identity of Hakata people. Local identity here means that Hakata identity invoked each summer by the Hakata Gion Yamakasa Festival. The Yamakasa tradition is pleasure that construct the identity of its followers. Cultural practice, Yamakasa, is emblems of primitivies in Japanese modernity.This Yamakasa event has achieved national recognition through mass media. Municipal and prefectural goverments have leveraged this domestic profile by funding overseas displays of Yamakasa. This marketing of the sacramental otherness of Japanese identity has been part of marketing strategy to publicise the products of the region.

The new experience from Hakata no Rekishi’s class was to walk the route of the Yamakasa Festival. This is a summer festival where at the end many many men carry a big Yamakasa. It is said that this event was created to protect from a plague of the mid-thirteenth century. The Yamakasa festival is usually held from 9^th of July to 15^th of July. Before the start a preperation is made. Normally a big Yamakasa (10m high) and a small are build. Just the smaller one will be used at the race. The route of the race is 5 km long, the same route we passed on field trip last week. We guided by the men of Yamakasa group called Hakata No Kaze.

The Hakata Gion Yamakasa casts a spell over the area surrounding Kushida Shrine. For a fortnight Hakata runs on Yamakasa time. The differing temporalities of Yamakasa are a time-stopping tradition that integrate cyclical, mythical, and social rhythms: “ritual makes no judgement on life; it integrates people and ghosts.” For me, lifetime careers as members of the Yamakasa tribes span annual cycles, diving back into the local mythology of each nagare.

Hakata no Kaze with their nagahappi

We gathered in the park near the Kushida Shrine. We got  some explanation from the men of Hakata No Kaze. They wore a traditional “uniform” based on the their nagare(section/town) called nagahappi. Each nagare has their own nagahappi where they belong. This walk was arranged to see the route’s history of Yamakasa Festival. The route was the original Hakata section and the Yamakasa supposed to go to all the section of that way in this day. On that day, I learned one thing, that the preservation of the tradition is not always on an easy ways. But nothing is impossible for it and Hakata No Kaze has proven it.

FWU WJC Students 2011

The Yamakasa itself was a race, so they have to run (race) as fast as they can through the route. The route were including Kushida Shrine (Yama Dome), the guardian shrine of Hakata which hosts Hakata Yamakasa every year; Tochoji temple, the first Mikkyo temple in Japan;Tochoji temple,we can see the biggest sitting figure of Buddha made of wood in Japan;Shofukuji temple which founded by Soichi Kokushi;the first sweets (chocolate) shop in Fukuoka; and also the birthplace of Kawakami Otojiro, an actor who performing Japanese theater overseas. 

Yamakasa Route