Owara Wind Bon
The festival of Owara Wind Bon Dance is held on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd days of September each year, regardless of the days of the week, in Yatsuo Town in Toyama Prefecture, 250km north-west of Tokyo. Beauty of the dance is widely known in Japan and attract more and more visitors every year. While most Bon dances in the rest of Japan are performed in mid-August, originally in order to remember and welcome the spirits of the deceased loved ones, Owara Wind Bon Dance is a deferred Bon dance, performed originally for pacifying the wind god to keep bearing rice from wind damages apt to occur in early September. The Festival and Dances were originally dedicated to the old local Buddhist temple of Monmyoji, by eleven oldest communities in Yatsuo Town, of several thousand people today. Yatsuo Town has been expanded by annexation to the population of 25 thousands now. Dances are performed to the rather sad tone of music by three-string Shamisens (balalaikas), three-string Kokyus (fiddles) and men's songs in falsetto.
Owara Bon Dance used to be a centuries-old rather difficult dance performed by professional Geisha, but around 1920, Dr. Junji Kawasaki (菇), the most respected medical doctor of the Town, invited renowned poets and a formal Japanese dance master to convert and enhance Owara Bon Dance to a less complex but more beautiful dance to a more artistical music. He wanted to make the Festival an everyone's festival, and wanted every resident of the Town to participate in the dance, despite the fact that in those days woman's dance in public used to be an act of professional women, not of decent normal women. He dared to have his own respected daughters participate in order to encourage other women of the Town. It is my guess that this fact led to the tradition that dancers perform covering their faces with straw hats. Because of this tradition, however, every dancer looks like a beauty by imagination. In 1920's, residents were poor, and therefore, the costumes were selected simple. Even today, men wear blackish working clothes and women wear colorful Yukata Kimonos, the cheapest among Kimono costumes, and black belts with the understanding that every household must have a black belt for the funeral costume.
In 1929, Mitsukoshi department store in Tokyo opened a fair featuring Toyama Prefecture. Owara Bon Dance was invited there. This event made Owara known to people outside the Town. In 1985, a novelist and movie director, Mr. Takahashi, wrote a novel, "Wind Bon Love Ballad". It is a tragic love story of a man and a woman. They knew each other when they were students. Each had a normal family through commonplace marriage and lived far away in Tokyo and in Kansai. They happened to meet again in their fifties and realized that they had loved each other much more than their current spouses. The man had a retreat house in Yatsuo Town to enjoy the Festival every year. He wrote to the woman to come to the Town during the Festival. Since then, they met and confirmed their love in Yatsuo Town only for three days every year during the Featival. But their bonds to the current spouses and families prevented them from committing to their love, and they selected happy death together. This tragedy was described by the author upon the background of Owara Wind Bon Dance. A critic said that the emphasized subject of the novel was more Owara than love affairs. This novel was dramatized in 1998, and later televised. The television had changed Owara from a rather local festival of 30 thousand visitors to the one attracting 300 thousand people in three days to the Town of several thousands. The top female singer, Ms. Sayuri Ishikawa, sang a song of the same title, "Wind Bon Love Ballad", and it was selected as one of the most popular songs of the year on the last day of 1998. The song says, "I wish you had loved me while I was still young and beautiful".
I knew of Owara but I had never seen it and I didn't know its beauty and unaccountable charm until 2001, when a business friend accidentally talked about it and lamented that he had never been there because hotels in the small Town were always booked up. It just slipped out of my mouth then that the mayor of the Town, Mr. Yoshimura, and I were in the same class in Univedrsity of Tokyo. I wrote to the mayor and two couples, my friend and his wife, and my wife and I, were able to watch the Festival for the first time, until 1 am, in 2001. My wife and I were so obsessed by the Festival that we were back again in 2002 and 2004. The Festival was on the weekdays in 2004, we visited there in a weekend in late August to watch a pre-festival. Pre-festivals are held on the last 11 days in August, when only one of the 11 communities is on duty. Pre-festivals are held since the Festival had become too much crowded. But recently pre-festivals themselves are also crowded.
The best dancers perform on the stage for competition among 11 communities. Only single girls under 25 and boys under 27, mostly highschool students, from the 11 oldest communities of the Town are qualified for selection in terms of dances and physical styles for the honor to dance on the stage. Youngsters shape themselves up in order to be selected. The best dances there are really beautiful and sensual. When they graduate from the competition stage, they are invited for the other competition among veterans on the balcony of the temple "Monmyoji". Residents dance on the community ground and in a procession on the street. Some communities hold ring dances on the streets inviting visitors to dance together.
I pondered what made Owara so attractive, and tentatively concluded that youth as in highschool students clad in adult costumes must be the key. Everyone must have aspiration for youth and Owara is incarnation of youth. Like most communities in Japan, those in Yatsuo Town see decreasing population of youngsters as well and can not but admit youngsters from communities in the Town other than the 11 oldest ones. We really hope that Owara will be continued and supported by young people there for long.
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