Into the dragon’s mouth

I’ve learned many unusual things in Japan about the way to health and happiness, but perhaps the most useful has been knowing that thrusting a screaming child into the mouth of a fire-breathing dragon will keep them healthy for a year.

Last Sunday we moseyed to the land of 2-story dragon floats where vendors were flicking octopus dumplings into the air like pizza chefs, where little children crunched through candy apples the size of their heads, where drunk men wobbling on a dragon tails sprayed sparklers across the heads of the crowd. This was the annual “dragon festival”, and its advertising blurb is second only to the one where children cover themselves in soot and haul on thick, braided ropes to pull their ancestors out of hell. Child labor at its finest. Unfortunately I will be back in Montana during the hell hauling, so I had to make do with huge paper dragons trying to bite off childrens’ heads and drunk teenagers sending off fireworks right between power lines or close enough to leave red burn marks on my shoulders.

The husband and I arrived separately from our group, and I called Hana, the Brit, as we disembarked from the train. “Follow the sound of drums,” she said. We weaved our way through crowds, stopping to get a slab of bird thigh on a stick and a bucket of fries. There’s nothing straightforward about directions in Japan, and if you have a sound to go on (in this case, drums) you’re probably more likely to find your target than if you have a complicated map that shows roads and by-roads and bike lanes crisscrossing in a mess that can only be described as spiderweb-esque. We found ourselves on a covered shopping street, brushing shoulders with girls dressed up in psychedelic yukata. We edged out of the masses, turned right, and BAM, a float with a dragon’s head the size of a small house floated into view. It was moving at a glacial pace, with children frolicking in between the heavy ropes the strapping young men were pulling to make it move down the street.

I can’t really ask you to imagine what I mean when I say the streets were “packed” because having never been to the dragon festival yourselves you’ll probably imagine something like stadium traffic after the superbowl. And you’d be sorely mistaken. Imagine, instead, that the entire population of Mongolia had uprooted themselves, brought along a whole heck of a lot of paper-mache and were now parading down the main street in your hometown, coming dangerously close to exploding everyone’s phone lines. There were dinky policemen everywhere, trying to herd the crowd this way and that, but people just walked right by them as though they were cardboard cutouts. We leapt into the streets, thronged with the masses, got right up in the dragon’s faces to take our pictures.

One children’s float glided past with five and six-year-olds sweating and heaving on the taiko drums, their little arms moving too fast to take in with the naked eye. The rest of them hung out the sides, like lost boys, their hair colored and spiked in all directions, some of them wearing masks. They had the look of young rabble, but they were no match for their older counterparts.

Teenage boys, dressed in dark blue mens’ yukata strolled through the crowds. Their robes hung open over their chests and they swung their arms purposefully. Their hair was done up in elaborate silver-sprayed mohawks or spiked straight around like a hedgehog. Piles of brown sake bottles filled the gutters on their side of the street.

We, the foreigners, stood in the middle of the street as a gold headed dragon inched toward us. A newspaper photographer, taking pictures with an expensive camera, turned his back to the gold dragon and snapped a dozen pictures of us. Hana coyly eating shaved ice, me smiling for the front page. “There’s a gold dragon behind him, and we’re the most interesting thing?” we asked each other.

Then it started to get dark. As soon as the first curtain was pulled, making it officially “dusky”, the teenagers in loincloths, lolling about the dragon’s heads, started loading the dragon’s whiskers like canons. Then, they shot off fireworks right over our heads, so the sparks fell hot and singing on our arms and bare legs (in other words, exactly like sparks are supposed to fall, and why you’re not supposed to light off fireworks over people in a radiant, scalding shower). The powerlines, which the weaving loincloth men had to duck under as the floats glided past, were encased in such a fog from the firework spray and the smoke bombs (did I mention the bombs? Big, green smoke bombs that made our eyes sting and our noses froth?) that we couldn’t see them after long. They were hidden up there, a dangling mass above our heads, threatening to fry open and plunge the whole city into darkness. Real darkness. The electrical kind.

I spent my time ducking and weaving, trying to avoid the sparkler sprays coming in all directions. I found I could stand just a little behind the dragon heads and as they pivoted to spray right and left they’d just miss me. Everyone turned away as the dragons sparked in their direction, so our backs, our light shirts and tender necks, took the brunt of the fire.

About halfway through the parade, as the dragon floats began to get low on their firework stashes, the men clamored down from their perches like ants coming off a hill and stood around the front of the dragon singing. This wasn’t sweet lullabayic singing, but instead raucous, rabble-raising singing that sounded like we’d joined a war party. There was stamping and waving of fans. Headbands were tied around sweaty brows. The whole thing felt animalistic, completely tribal, the drums going in the background like a heartbeat, the fireworks going off on all sides. Then they brought forth the children.

One-by-one mothers brought their babies out of the crowd and handed them over to the men. A leader would take the child, put one hand under its head and then start a chant that sounded like a pirate’s theme song while he shoved the child in and out of the dragon’s mouth, the giant paper teeth looming over the 1,2,3-year-olds like icebergs. The children all cried piercing, horrified screams. The whole routine lasted about 30 seconds.

For a while there was some pressure for me to try, me being the smallest foreigner, the easiest to lift. But by the time I stepped up the blue dragon head was already moving on, down the street, looking for more children to scare. All the adjectives in my arsenal can’t really explain why I wasn’t more forthcoming, didn’t insist they give me the protection of health for one year. But I suspect now that deep down I was a little scared. Being man-handled by men, sprayed by fire, given chicken thighs and octopus fritters for dinner. It’s not only little children who get a little squeamish on nights like that.