お水取り (Omizu-tori)

This past Saturday I ventured to Nara to see Omizu-tori, a special festival that has been celebrated at Todai-ji Temple for over 1200 years. You may recall from an earlier blog entry of mine that Todai-ji is the place that houses one of the biggest sitting buddha statues in the world. This festival is celebrated so that water drawn from a huge well can be purified using fire torches.

It takes over two hours to travel from my home in Kobe to Todai-ji in Nara, and to be on the safe side, I arrived a little early. It took about twenty minutes to walk from the train station to Todai-ji, but the temperature was above average, and the walk was pleasant. I entered the temple grounds forty-five minutes before the ceremony was to begin, and it was already packed! I was standing pretty far back from the temple itself, which was not anywhere near the sanctuary in which the buddha statue is situated. People kept arriving behind where I was standing, and soon the entire area was filled up. I'm sure there were people lining the pathway through the woods up to the temple area, but I doubt they were able to see any of the ceremony because of all the trees.

The ceremony consisted of men holding extremely long (maybe three meters?) poles with bundles of flaming sticks tied to the far ends. The poles were held up high in the air and waved around, all the while pieces of burning sticks and sparks were flying off the ends. The men would wave the poles on the left side of the temple, then run along the edge of the temple platform while twirling the poles and finally stop at the right end of the temple, wave the pole some more until all the sticks had burned and fallen off, and then the next man and pole would arrive. My host mom had warned me to not sit too close to the front lest I sit underneath the falling sparks, but there was no way that would have happened given the size of the crowd. The ceremony itself lasted for a mere twenty minutes, but I'm glad I was able to experience yet another Japanese tradition.