Explore everyday life in Japan
Every year, on August 15 and 16, there is a very small and very local kenka matsuri (fighting festival) in a small neighborhood of Niigata City that is known as Nuttari.
At first glance, this festival might appear to be all about strength, bravado, and drunkenness, but in reality, there is much more to it than the festival’s enigmatic finale might suggest.
In Japan, neighborhoods are divided into small zones, and those zones are sometimes divided into even smaller quarters.
The families and people living in each zone share responsibilities regarding the care and upkeep of the area in which they live. Each year, a different family is put in charge of collecting dues from the other families and people living in their zone. These fees are then used for various things like replacing the communal bucket and broom that is used to clean the nearby garbage station, or paying for movie tickets so that the children in the area can have a night out together during summer vacation, etc. Community clipboards with important news and announcements are also passed around the zones from house to house.
In addition to these typical Japanese zone committees, many of the various zones in the Nuttari neighborhood also form festival committees.
A year before the festival takes place, planning begins. This planning involves multiple meetings, which are often based around drinking beer and Japanese sake while having a meal or snacks of some kind. At these meetings, themes and designs are considered and chosen for decorating the large wooden lantern frames that are carried through the streets and ultimately smashed into each other during the festival. Committee members are appointed to carefully draw and paint each of the panels that are used to decorate these frames. Other members are given the tasks of repairing and maintaining them, while other members are put in charge of duties like buying new uniforms, removing old uniforms from storage and arranging their cleaning, learning on how to play the local festival folk song on the taiko drums and bamboo flutes, etc.
Great pride is taken by each zone when preparing for this festival.
The preparations that are made become representations of the neighborhood’s zones themselves. They represent the skill, working spirit, and camaraderie of all the people living there.
That is why, when you see a festival like this, one in which beautiful works of art are painstakingly planned and made over the course of a year and then proudly put on display and carried through the various zones of the Nuttari neighborhood for two days before they are violently smashed into each other, it’s important to remember that what you are seeing is not just a wild celebration or an annual competition of strength, but is in actuality a display of community pride and togetherness, something that community members of all ages can participate in over the full course of two days.
This is an ongoing series that will explore various aspects of daily life in Japan. My hope is that this series will not only reveal to its followers, image by image, what Japan looks like, but that it will also inform its followers about unique Japanese items and various cultural and societal practices. If you are interested in getting regular updates about life in Japan, please consider following me at @boxcarblue. If you have any questions about life in Japan, please don’t hesitate to ask. I will do my best to answer all of your questions.