Dave Cahill

Found this while looking up cabin types on Japanese ferries for an upcoming trip.

Bunk beds were always a bit crap, but imagine you’re on a ferry in a turbulent sea, climbing up the shaky ladder to the top bunk bed, waking your neighbours as the ladder wobbles around. Not cool.

Japan says no to this kind of thing, and using almost exactly the same amount of space, pulls this awesome design out of the bag. No waking neighbours, better privacy (one wall closed off from others’ view), and about 100% extra coolness:

Colour me impressed.

A taiko player raises his drumstick to the sky as the bonfire flames lick higher.

This is my favourite photograph from this weekend’s Kosuge Mura festival. Like all of the other photos in this post, it was taken by a fellow JET and photography graduate, the talented Kelly Bryan.

I was lucky enough to play a yamabushi – a mountain monk – at the festival. Another JET, Clint Peters, was taking part along with 8 locals and managed to get me invited too – thanks Clint! First, we carried big flaming torches down the riverbank, lighting small fires all along both banks:

Then, we each introduced ourselves to the crowd. It was a fantastic feeling to roar out the old Japanese words in a deep, rolling, samurai-style voice. Mine was, roughly translated:
“I am the Irish mountain monk, Dave Cahill. I have come today to give you love.” Yes, just like the Simpsons episode – “I bring you love!”

Anyway, with the introductions over, we set 3 huge bonfires with our torches. Here’s a before and after:

BEFORE (Around 2pm on the day of the festival)

AFTER (Around 7pm, i.e. after we went at it with our torches)

The heat was like nothing I had ever felt before. The towering flames grew threateningly in the wind, hordes of orange sparks flew through the air, and wave after wave of heat washed over our faces. Standing there in the intense heat of the fire, looking around and smiling at my fellow monks, was definitely a moment to remember.

When the fire died down a little, we waded back across the river to great applause. This is Clint, emerging from the river dripping wet and freezing!

To finish off the festival, we touched our torches against a pole – at the exact moment we touched the pole, a barrage of fireworks blasted into the sky, capping off another amazing night in Japan.

Here in Japan, I’m often reminded of Butch in Pulp Fiction talking about how American names don’t mean anything. Japanese names are made up of Chinese characters, each of which has a meaning.

I imagine that it must be pretty tough picking names as a Japanese parent – they don’t just need to sound good, they also need to mean something nice. In fairness, I think they interpret meanings a little more loosely than us, though; one of my teachers has a name which translates to English as “Graceful Vegetable”.

Given a non-Japanese name like David, you can work backwards and see what combinations of Chinese characters will fit the sounds in the name. So, Graceful Vegetable and I once tried to find some good characters to fit my name. Unfortunately, the best we could come up with is this:

It means: Exit, Well, Person. Roughly: “The person who comes out of the well”. Hmmm. The original Hebrew meaning of David is Beloved, so I think I’ll stick with that.

Jacques Chirac may be a fan, but I wasn’t going to sumo for the craic. My motivations were more cultural – I viewed it as kind of a “museum visit”. After all, how much fun could it possibly be to watch two fat guys push each other around?

A hell of a lot, it turns out.

I remember going to watch a rally when I was younger and thinking that the exciting part was when a car crashed or span out, and that didn’t happen enough. The great thing about sumo is that there are no crashless rallies. No goalless draws, no drab stalemates. Technically, if a wrestler touches the ground with anything but his feet, or puts one toe over the straw bales that mark the edge of the dohyo, it’s over. But the dramatic sight of a 150kg man hitting the floor or flying out of the ring (the dohyo) is much more common!

We arrived early at Ryogoku (両国) stadium in Tokyo, and stayed down at the premium seating area for an hour or so, close enough to see every flabby contour of the wrestler’s butts. These early-morning competitors were from the lower ranks, and the owners of the premium seats wouldn’t arrive until much later, when the real wrestlers started.

For us, though, the rapid-fire early matches were a great way to get a feel for how sumo worked before the big matches began. The rough structure is:

1. Staredown.
The wrestlers hunker down and glare at each other to psyche each other out. They may break away and come back a few seconds later to hunker and glare again. Different ranks have different staring time limits – the lower rank matches come in rapid succession because they have almost no staring time, whereas the big matches are drawn out and suspenseful thanks to their longer limit.

2. Wrestling
At some point, the hunker-and-glare breaks into a fight, and they’re off.

As the higher grade wrestlers started to appear, the premium seating gradually filled up, and we went back to our 4,900 yen (€31) upper-tier seats. After some great higher-rank matches, we were treated to the kind of finale you could only dream of. When a yokozuna, a top-ranked wrestler, loses a bout, spectators throw their zabuton (cushions) down at the dohyo. Asashoryu (朝青龍 明徳), probably the most famous yokozuna, came on for the final bout of the day, and lost in spectacular style, sending cushions flying in all directions. Thankfully I caught it on video – Asashoryu is the guy with the black nappy (mawashi). Check it out!

We had an amazing day, and if you’re in Tokyo during a tournament you’d be insane to miss out – you can find details on sumo tournament dates here. All in all, it looks like Mr. Chirac and I have more in common than I realised!