Today was one of the important pre-events of the Gion Matsuri, when the mikoshi arai (purification of the kami’s palanquin) took place. Basically the mikoshi of Yasaka Shrine (aka Gion sha), which is the host shrine of the Gion Festival, is taken from the shrine down to Shijo Bridge where it is purified by water from the Kamogamo River.
This was the first time I’ve seen the event, and I guess there were some three to four hundred people thronging the bridge awaiting the arrival of the mikoshi. I’d heard it would arrive at 7.30 though it was more like 8.00 by the time it came. A small procession of men in white yukata led the mikoshi, and their chanting was just about drowned out by a phalanx of policemen yelling simultaneously at people to keep back because it was ‘taihen abunai (terribly dangerous). In fact the only danger was that the police were letting buses pass through, even as a religious ceremony was being carried out on the bridge.
One of the three Yasaka Jinja mikoshi, spiritual heart of the Gion Festival. The three deities honoured are Susanoo no mikoto, his wife and their children.
Men with large taimatsu torches accompanied the procession, which would stop occasionally while those carrying the mikoshi would give it a vigorous jostle. It reminded me of a passage in Donald Richie about the kami being like little children who enjoy being shaken and thrown around like babies in the arms of their parents. I’d presume that it’s the Shinto love of vitality that lies behind the jostling.
The mikoshi was on Shijo Bridge for about fifteen minutes while there was some kind of ceremony and it was washed with water from the river below, but unfortunately I was on the wrong side of the bridge to see what was going on. Presumably in days gone past, the mikoshi would have been taken down to the river itself. (It was on the dry river bed here that kabuki first developed, when a miko dancer from Izumo called Okuni performed theatre skits in ‘crazy’ kabuki fashion.)
‘Mawase, mawase,’ I could hear the chant at one point, when they wanted the mikoshi to be turned around so it could head back to Yasaka Jinja, where a Noh play was going to be performed. It was a brief but important event that serves as a reminder that we’re only five days away from the Yoiyama evenings of open houses and yukata crowds – something to look forward to in the humid Kyoto heat!
(Today being the 10th is also the day when work starts on assembling the hoko and yama floats, which will be displayed during the evenings of the 15th and 16th before the parade on the 17th.)
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