Hashira Matsu Shinji was one such seminal moment.
I first attended this festival last year thanks to the exhaustive research efforts of a friend who tracked down information about this little-known matsuri. Here is the brief overview he circulated this year to fellow ALTs:
"In a nutshell, with details left out, expect the following:
When we arrive, men from the town should be dragging the dressed 22 meter long tree trunk through town to a dammed up river canal. The guys grab people and throw them into the river (they are courteous about it, and make sure the people they toss in divest themselves of anything that could be damaged or lost). If I remember correctly, they dunk the tree trunk in the river as well.
After this, they drag the trunk across highway 378, stopping traffic in both directions, and huck it over a guardrail into the sea, about 10 meters below. Men jump in after the tree, and swim it up to the mouth of the river, then drag it up to the shrine, where they decorate it a bit, put on a rope ladder, and replant the tree in the ground, standing up. There's a break at this point.
The evening's events start up around 6, with ushi-oni and 5 deer dancing. Then the kagura (a type of shinto-related dance, some dances use swords, others are more theater than dance, yet others are semi-acrobatic, many dances star masked demons) starts up. I have seen a lot of kagura, and the performances at this festival were pretty good. I also dug the music- very hypnotic drum, flute, and cymbals. Sounds more like santaria or voodoo music than Japanese stuff. I taped it last year, and will be taping it again this year.
The climax comes around midnight, with a fiery acrobatic finale.
This is not a huge festival as far as spectator turnout is concerned, and it isn't even that well known within Yawatahama. But that's typical of events like this. To me, this type of non-commercial, community festival really captures the spririt of a "matsuri". Not to mention that performances of this kind- as well as fire-purification/ religious-magical fire prevention festivals- aren't all that common in Ehime."
This year we were rained out for the early part of the festival but still managed to see the dancing. At midnight the dancers left the shrine to begin the finale. A bonfire was lit. Against the background of the relentless percussion one fearless dancer climbed the twenty-two meter tree with a torch tied to his back. After cutting off the top portion of the tree and tossing it (along with the torch) into the fire below, he descended to the grown via a long rope that was twined between the top of the tree and the shrine. He crawled along this rope at an alarming height with nothing to catch him should he fall. The effect was quite dramatic and his motion resembled that of a spider moving slowly along its web (hence the nickname for this type of Kagura -"spider dance").
