10/16/2026
Who said my people are quiet??
While we are respectful(mostly), reserved(until drinking starts), and modest, the version of Japanese people that is quiet and rather demure is not all the whole truth. That version is inconvenient to the ideal created a long ago, to sanitize the Japanese spirit to appease orientalism and exotization of Japan made by the West.
Here, our spirit is loud, carrying around the shrine through the town, showing our grit by carrying 神輿mikoshi, sometimes weighs up to 3tons. While I have no idea what our neighborhood one weighs (guessing something around 1 ton or so), carrying spirit around is not a light job. But here, we gather, laugh, drink and raise our spirit to meet the task in joy and levity.
Carrying mikoshi reminds me that my relationship to the spirit is not only rainbows, unicorns and light precisely because of these experiences. Doing challenging things is a norm; the work of keeping the tradition and ancestors are sometimes heavy. But we are never carrying this weight alone. It takes more than 40 ppl to carry it, and we had over 90 ppl from the age of 19-80 altogether to make this happen just for our mikoshi alone.
When the world is heavy, when the spirit is coming through with force, it is our relationships and our interdependent nature alone that sustain us to move forward - slowly, stumbling yet steady as a whole. And there is always joy in knowing that we are never alone, backwards and forwards, for as long as we remember that we are all a part of this living remembrance.
