3.d Wrapping the deity into the mikoshi

When the deity is inside the mikoshi, the kannushi seals the portable Shrine with a small ribbon. If the mikoshi is a new one he places a mirror, which refers to the mythological story of the first deity/emperor Amaterasu. For a new mikoshi he wraps the door with a white cloth. The carriers take the mikoshi downstairs carefully. At this moment the deity starts showing its strength and power. The portable Shrine moves, shakes and jumps fiercely, showing all its power and magnificence. The carriers are thrown form one side to the other, stumbling through the forest. The mikoshi dances and jumps threatening all those around, and specially the danjiri. The danjiri men play hard and loud. The kannushi, followed by the toya, take the prestations and start a procession into the forest. There they make a second offering. In some villages, especially if the mikoshi is new, pieces of mochi are thrown to all participants. The throwing forces them to compete in catching the auspicious cakes. Hendry argues that ‘the portable Shrine represents, rather than carries the local deity, and it is to be admired from without rather than penetrated to some sacred core’. I agree that the deity is not ‘carried’, but as villagers say, ‘the deity moves the Shrine with its strength’. The deity wraps the community with its journey. In the journey into the village, more gifts circulate. The mikoshi stops at each household. The neighbours come out and see the spectacle. Men and women offer wrapped bottles of sake to the mikoshi. They place them either at the genkan of the mikoshi or give them to the sodai, who follow with a truck and write down the names and prestations. In a break from the long journey, a smiling man came out with a box of beers and cups of sake. He said to me:

I do not go to the Shrine, I am too busy with my restaurant. The best part of the festival is when the mikoshi comes to the village, though. When the mikoshi passes by, I give sake to the mikoshi. We also bring beer and sake for the mikoshi men, because they are thirsty after so much effort, we give them the drinks, sometimes money, to thank them for their ‘help’. He gives me soft drinks and a box of sweet corn. He thanks me for my interest in going with the mikoshi.

At this point of the ritual, we meet an inversion. The remote wrapped Shrine, always peripheral and ‘above’, is now right at the margins of the village, clearly in contact with the households.

The collection of sake is crucial at this time. Villagers at the margin of the Shrine are compelled at the sight of the mikoshi to come out of their houses and offer a prestation, ‘to thank’ and ‘to ask for the auspiciousness of’ the deity. The opposite is also true: the sodai are coerced to wrap the village into the festival process by having to ‘descend’ to the village and collect the gifts. Seen in this way, the festival collection of gifts becomes a battle for the management of gifts, and the limits of the interdependence between households. The relations among neighbours are more informal here, and they thank each other with a bow. Villagers return to the inside of their houses. Gifts are central to the villagers formulation of the political relations among households in a village. It is the sodai’s role to renounce the power they acquire through gifts by moving and making a display of the power of the deity.

This kind of relation, in which sodai are the organisers and beneficiaries (recipients) of gifts, who manage to convince the young members of the village to use their strength and carry the mikoshi and play music for auspiciousness, and the villagers, who ultimately decide to ‘thank’ them or not with gifts, epitomises the villagers’ way of organising themselves as a community. The understanding of how to organise a community is then paradigmatically based on how to extract strength from the young (as well as to decide which house is ‘young’ and which is ‘senior’). Sodai, as well as most figures of seniors, such as school teachers and local politicians, obtain their political vitality by negotiating how to extract the vitality and strength of others, with the consent of the village through their bestowal of gifts of sake as ‘thanks’.