Page 4 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
ASIA / PACIFIC
December 16, 2019
Shinto festival carries on centuries-old tradition in Japan
By Malcolm Foster
The Associated Press
C
HICHIBU, Japan — As fireworks
light up the winter night, scores of
men, women, and teenagers crying
washoi, washoi haul the last of six
towering, lantern-covered floats up a small
hill and into the town center, the
culminating moment of a Shinto festival
that has evolved from a harvest
thanksgiving into a once-a-year meeting
between two local gods.
The Chichibu Night Festival, which has
roots stretching more than 1,000 years, is
one of three famous Japanese festivals to
feature huge floats that can top 23 feet and
weigh up to 15 tons. They are pulled
through the streets on large wooden
wheels by hundreds of residents in
traditional festival garb — headbands,
black leggings, and thick cotton jackets
emblazoned with Japanese characters —
to drums, whistles, and exuberant chants.
Shinto is Japan’s indigenous religion
that goes back centuries. It is an animism
that believes there are thousands of kami,
or spirits, inhabiting nature, such as
forests, rivers, and mountains. People are
encouraged to live in harmony with the
spirits and can ask for their help.
Ancestors also become kami and can help
the living.
The two-day festival has its roots in an
older tradition of villagers giving thanks to
the nearby mountain god for helping them
during the planting and harvesting
season, said Minoru Sonoda, the chief
priest of the Chichibu Shrine and a former
Kyoto University professor of religious
studies. In 2016, it was designated a
UNESCO intangible cultural heritage.
“It’s a time to celebrate the bounty of
nature,” Sonoda said.
During medieval times, the festival
evolved into a celebration of an annual
rendezvous between the nearby mountain
god and the goddess of the town. The latter
is carried in an ornate ark-like box by a
group of white-clad men through streets to
the central park, where it rests while the
six floats slowly converge on the crowded
square, each one’s arrival celebrated with
a burst of fireworks.
But these days, many Japanese who
flock to the festival, which draws about
200,000 people every December, don’t
know either of those stories and say the
event holds no religious meaning for them
— but they do want to maintain the
tradition. They visit the town, about 90
minutes by train northwest of Tokyo,
simply for a fun, cultural experience:
walking the thronged streets, watching
the procession, and eating from the
hundreds of food stalls selling grilled
squid, yakitori chicken skewers, and
dozens of other snacks.
Some may squeeze in a quick visit to the
Chichibu Shrine to offer a prayer, typically
done by clapping one’s hands twice to get
the attention of the gods and then bowing
with folded hands.
“I like the fireworks and the food. Purely
to enjoy. I don’t really think about the
religious aspects,” said Mitsuo Yamashita,
a 69-year-old retiree who has come to the
festival for the past 15 years. “Japanese
aren’t very religious, and in other ways
we’re all over the place religiously.”
Many Japanese freely mix religions
depending on the occasion, visiting a
Shinto shrine at New Year’s, holding a
Buddhist funeral, or getting married in a
Christian wedding, a popular option even
though only 1% of the population is
Christian.
“I don’t know if that means we’re flexible
or if we don’t have convictions,” Yamashita
said.
Religion seen differently
Roaming the streets in the afternoon, a
group of high school girls decked out in
festival jackets and headbands, who later
joined in pulling the floats, said the
festival wasn’t religious at all for them.
And yet they emphatically said they
believed the story about the two gods
meeting that evening.
“It’s romantic!” said Rea Kobayashi, 17.
The girls also said they would celebrate
Christmas with a decorated tree and
gift-giving and didn’t see any problem
mixing religions.
“No problem! That’s normal. Most
Japanese do that,” said Rio Nishimiya, 18.
“We’re good at that. If it’s fun, that’s all
that matters.”
“Japanese are flexible,” said her friend,
Meiri Shimada, also 18. “That’s a good
thing!”
Such views are shared by many
Japanese. Attitudes toward religion are
ambiguous. Many would say they aren’t
religious — and yet every year millions of
Japanese visit Shinto shrines and
Buddhist temples across Japan and have
little shrines in their homes where they
pray.
Religion is viewed differently in Japan,
and in some other parts of Asia, than in the
west or the Islamic world, where there is
an emphasis on individual faith and a set
of beliefs, or a creed, based on a sacred text
such as the Bible or Koran.
In Japan, religion is more of a cultural,
communal, and ritualistic thing than a
personal faith.
Shinto has no sacred text or clearly
defined theology, and many Japanese
would be hard-pressed to summarize it,
including many visitors to this festival.
“It’s a religion of life,” said Sonoda, the
chief priest, in an attempt to summarize
Shinto. “It’s something inherited from
ancestors that provides a spirituality
passed on from parent to child. And this
isn’t just for humans, but we are also
linked to animals and all living things. It’s
CHICHIBU NIGHT FESTIVAL. Participants
clad in kimono prepare to pull a float before it goes to
the town central square at the Chichibu Night Festival
in Chichibu, north of Tokyo, Japan. Moving six tower-
ing floats up a hill and into the town center is the cul-
minating moment of a Shinto festival that has evolved
from a harvest thanksgiving into a once-a-year meet-
ing between two local gods. (AP Photo/Toru Hanai)
because of them that we’re alive.”
“Worldview may be a better way to
describe it,” he said.
There are no definitive numbers on
Shinto believers in Japan simply because
there’s nothing definite to count. “We don’t
use the phrase ‘believers,’” Sonoda said.
There are no weekly services and no
missionaries to spread Shinto.
Coexistence
Sonoda said other folk religions share
traits with Shinto. He recalls visiting a
Hopi native American community years
ago. They were holding a festival giving
thanks to the spirits that lived in a nearby
mountain and came down every spring to
help the people with the planting season,
and in winter would return to the
mountain, he said.
“That made a big impression on me,” he
said.
There are more than 80,000 Shinto
shrines across Japan, and nearly as many
Buddhist temples, and the two have
generally coexisted peacefully after
Buddhism’s introduction to Japan in the
6th century, along with Confucian thought
from China.
That long history of coexistence is one
key reason behind Japanese attitudes
toward religion.
“Each religion had a different role, and
these three — Shinto, Buddhism, and
Confucianism — shaped Japanese
culture,” said Susumu Shimazono, a
professor of religion at Tokyo’s Sophia
University, a Jesuit school. “There was
some dogma, but none of these religions
stressed exclusiveness. This sort of
combination of ideas and philosophies is
typical of East Asia.”
Experts say interest in Shinto among
ordinary Japanese is holding steady or
even increasing. As one measure of this,
visitors to the Ise Grand Shrine, Japan’s
most important shrine, have grown in
recent years, running to 8.9 million
through November, up from 7.8 million
during the same period last year and 8.5
million for all of 2017.
Shinto is also closely entwined with the
Japanese imperial family, holding that the
Continued on page 5
Deadly India fire in one of thousands of illegal factories
By Sheikh Saaliq and Emily Schmall
The Associated Press
N
EW DELHI — Day laborers in one
of New Delhi’s most congested
neighborhoods
demonstrated
against unsafe working conditions a day
after at least 43 people were killed in a
devastating fire at an illegal factory.
Dozens of workers who were asleep
when the fire broke out were trapped in the
burning four-story building with little
ventilation and only one exit.
Tucked in an alleyway tangled with
electrical wires, firefighters had to fight
the blaze from 330 feet away. Rescuers
carried out survivors and the dead one by
one.
The building, zoned for residential use,
had been clandestinely and crudely
converted into a cluster of small factories
in a pattern repeated in old and crowded
areas across the city of 28 million.
Tens of thousands of such spaces have
been closed in a drive spurred by a
decades-old court case, but a Delhi Munici-
pal Corporation census counted more than
30,000 illegal factories last year.
The tragedy illustrates the struggle of
authorities to control the proliferation of
illegal factories in ancient parts of the city
that were long exempt from regulation,
despite the Supreme Court order to close
them or revamp the surrounding city
infrastructure, including widening roads
and installing water service, according to
New Delhi’s master plan.
Factories operating in areas zoned
residential were ordered closed.
“What happened in Delhi was
unfortunately they were completely
illegalized, so what we have now is this
mushrooming happening in completely
underground ways, all over the city. They
moved the entire sector to the
underground,” said Anuj Bhuwania, an
associate law professor at Ambedkar
University in New Delhi who has studied
the public interest litigation cases that
spurred the Supreme Court order.
More than 100 migrant workers earning
as little as $2 a day making handbags,
caps, and other garments worked in the
fire-gutted building’s 500 square meters
(about 5,400 square feet). The building
was built about 15 years ago as a
residential complex and later quietly
turned into a commercial hub, according to
Delhi Municipal Corporation officials.
The dense neighborhood is home to
thousands of migrant workers from across
India who often live and work in the same
space.
Aslam, a local resident who goes by one
name, said the building was among many
that lack necessary clearances and fire
safety equipment.
He said there was a small fire in the
same building in March. There were no
reported injuries and local residents put it
out themselves, but it should have set off
alarm bells, he said.
“The building was a disaster in the
making. Almost every building in this
neighborhood is unsafe,” Aslam said.
Manufacturing in New Delhi has
declined with a clampdown on illegal
activity and the rise of the service sector.
There were about 130,000 factory spaces
in 2001, according to an official economy
survey. With growing public concern about
industrial pollution contributing to New
Delhi’s noxious air, authorities have
shuttered tens of thousands of illegal
factory operations since then.
The 30,000-plus illegal factories found
by the Delhi Municipal Corporation census
last year are nearly quadruple the number
of factories registered with New Delhi’s
planning department in 2017.
Jai Prakash, a municipal administrator
in New Delhi, said they are continuously
trying to close illegal factories and small
manufacturing units.
One complication is the shortage of
affordable housing.
Many of these spaces also serve as
sleeping quarters for poor laborers and
their families who migrate from Indian
villages and small towns for employment.
Another administrator, Varsha Joshi,
said it is building owners who usually turn
residential buildings into commercial
hubs. Aslam said that often, each floor of a
building is informally leased to a different
commercial tenant who uses middlemen to
find contract workers.
The owner of the building that caught
fire recently was detained on suspicion of
culpable homicide not amounting to
murder. He remains in custody but hasn’t
been formally charged while the
investigation continues. Bhuwania said
cracking down in this case would do little
to keep small factories from operating
within Delhi.
“Being so fundamentalist about zoning
in this city makes no sense. This is not the
reality of the city,” he said. “This is a
fantasy city that they want to build.”