The Art of the Summer Matsuri

Japanese people love festivals. If you wanted to, you could plan an entire trip to Japan based on attending local festivals every weekend. They hold them for pretty much every conceivable event, particularly natural events. The far north probably takes the prize for some of the strangest cold-weather traditions, mostly involving freezing temperatures and nowhere near enough clothing (sometimes, no clothing at all).

Summer matsuri are slightly different. Very little is required of the participant: mostly the festivals exist as an excuse for getting out of doors (the Japanese are not big on picnics and such) and eating festival food. Basically every city, town, and village in the country has its own summer matsuri -- even if it consists only of a stage with local musicians performing, and a few stalls selling fried food.

Sendai’s biggest festival is the Tanabata Festival in early August. Most cities in Japan celebrate the event, but Sendai’s version is probably the most famous.

Tanabata Festivals celebrate the alignment of a certain set of stars, mythically a pair of lovers separated by the Milky Way for almost the entire year. The story goes that many years ago, Orihime, the daughter of the King of the Universe, wove beautiful cloth for her father. However, she was sad that she worked too hard to ever be able to meet eligible bachelors. So her father arranged for her to meet and marry Kengyu, a cow herder. They fell in love, and in their… distraction, forgot either to weave or to herd the cows. The King of the Universe became annoyed by the lack of cloth and the cows running amok, and put them on opposite sides of the Milky Way. They were so sad, however, that he eventually relented and now allows them to meet for one day per year.

Given that the festival celebrates the actual, observable movement of stars, you’d think the date would be fixed -- but apparently the differences between the lunisolar calendar and the Gregorian calendar mean that some places celebrate in early July and others in early August. So says wikipedia.

Sendai falls into the August camp. For three days in early August, the city is crowded to brimming with tourists from all over Japan, who come to see the fireworks, the parade, and the literally thousands of paper streamer decorations.

Why we celebrate a practically-doomed love affair with crepe paper decorations is beyond me. But they are really very beautiful, and since it brings good fortune to make one, pretty much every business in downtown Sendai (especially along the two main shopping arcades, where the majority of people go for their paper-decoration-viewing) hangs one outside their doors. Many double as advertisements, which can lead to some of the funniest and most interesting versions:

I wonder what the king of the universe would have to say.

Cambodia, July 25th - August 3rd

Although I have not yet become what you might be able to call an experienced traveller, I have noticed a certain pattern in the countries I have visited: once I’ve left, I am more interested in the next new destination than in going back. Countries form a sort of to-do list in my head, and once I’ve checked one off, I feel no desire to give it any additional checks.

But I want to go back to Cambodia. I wanted to go back to Cambodia as soon as I boarded the flight out of Cambodia. And what’s more, I want everyone else to go to Cambodia too. I want everyone to corroborate my impression that it is a country worth untold numbers of visits.

This despite having my ticket cancelled and being stuck there for two and a half very stressful days. [Long story short: go to a travel agent and pay for tickets with cash. Do not use a credit card, and really do not use a friend’s credit card.] It is not every country that can combat that level of anxiety.

It is a fascinating, inspiring, utterly humbling place.

Almost by accident, we embarked on a chronological tour of some of the more pertinent aspects of Cambodian history. And so you will too.

We started in Angkor, the ancient capital of the country and now the site of some of the most worthily famous ruins in the world. Even when the Khmer Rouge embarked on their anti-religious destruction spree of every wat (temple) they could find, they spared Angkor as a testament to Khmer glory.

And what a testament it is.

Angkor was functional as the capital from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, beginning when one of the kings declared himself a demi-god and consolidated all the lands he felt entitled to rule over. He also began a spree of temple- and palace-building that continued for four hundred years, with each god-king feeling compelled to build bigger and better temples than his predecessor. Meanwhile, the god-kings also switched from Hinduism to Buddhism and back again at least a couple of times, meaning that it takes a very knowledgeable person (or a guidebook) to keep straight which temple employs which arcane symbolism and why. (Unless there’s a large Buddha sculpture and a nun who wants you to buy incense; that’s usually a pretty good clue that you’re in a Buddhist temple.)

As international travel becomes more and more common, and as Cambodia becomes more and more politically stable, Angkor has become more and more touristed. This is both good and bad. It is nice to be able to learn about the history of the place from discreet plaques and signs, or from eavesdropping on someone else’s tour guide (the Japanese tourists got very confused when three white people started listening to their guide). It is a boon to the historians and archaeologists for whom attention is the money they desperately need to preserve and restore the temples. It means that Angkor and its gateway city of Siem Reap are remarkably safe -- and tourist-friendly in such ways as having vegetarian food.

Granted, it is a little difficult to reflect upon the bygone glory of the Khmer empire when surrounded by five-year-old modern Khmers who would really like you to give them a dollar in exchange for water, souvenirs, or a photograph of their adorable selves.

It is a little hard to not feel like so many moneyed cattle when your tuk-tuk driver has a predesigned route of seven temples to take you on, the same seven temples he showed to the hundreds of Westerners before you and will show to the hundreds of Westerners after you.

It is a little annoying to not be able to get a photograph of the temples without someone else’s head in it, or to have to line up to take a photograph of some of the more famous spots.

Somehow, though, it doesn’t matter. When I look back on the temples, what I remember isn’t the noise of the temple-sellers and the other tourists, or the nearly-constant camera flashes, or even the history. I remember the quiet, because even in the most popular temples it was almost always possible to slip through one doorway and suddenly feel like you were the only person there. I remember the moss, and the tumbled stones, and the aching sense of loss as I tried and failed to imagine what these structures must have looked like whole. I remember the carvings, especially the apsaras that I became almost obsessively fond of.

I haven’t been that many places, but even people who have say that Angkor is like nowhere else I’ve ever been.

From Angkor, the Cambodian kings managed to repel an attack from the Vietnamese in the late 1100s, but were eventually defeated by the Thai armies in 1431. The temples were never forgotten, but were all-but abandoned and left to languish in the jungle for the next four hundred years, until a French explorer rediscovered them in the late 19th century. Ever since, the French have been at the forefront of restoration efforts.

Meanwhile, the political and emotional centre of Cambodia had shifted to the capital city of Phnom Penh.

This has stayed true for six hundred years, with the exception of the four years’ rule of the Khmer Rouge. The KR, for those who don’t know, were a radical Communist regime that embarked upon a mission of “ideological cleansing” (my term) from 1975-79 which caused the deaths of over two million Cambodians (out of a population of only seven million) from starvation, disease, and outright murder. As that suggests, the KR had the tenets, and certainly the interpretation, of Marxism considerably confused. They distrusted all city dwellers, and forced the populations of all the cities, most noticeably Phnom Penh, out into the countryside to work as slave labor on communal farms.

The government did continue to rule from Phnom Penh, however, which means that there are various memorials and historical sites around the city. The two most famous, and most heart-breaking, are the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, the former site of the prison where 20,000 men, women, and children were tortured into “confessions” of wrongdoing against the state, and the Choeung Ek Killing Fields, where those people were murdered and thrown into mass graves.

I have no pictures from either site. They have been considerably “touristed” as Cambodia has become a more popular destination, with the result that visiting them felt to me more like looking at a museum than looking at a gravesite and a site of such horrific human misery. I wish I could say I cried; I would feel like a better person if I had. But somehow my mind just refused to put the people in the mug shots into the torture chambers or out onto the Killing Fields. (I was by no means the only one -- and I was not as bad as the Japanese tourists posing and saying “Okay... cheese!”) Maybe it’s true that the gratuitous violence on television renders us immune to true human suffering. I’m sure it was a mercy.

[Wait, stay with me, I’m about to stop being depressing.]

Even these sites, though, offered up their own kind of inspiration. Walking out the gates of Tuol Sleng or off the Killing Fields, places that were operational within the living memory of my parents, I found it almost hard to believe that the city is functional at all. There are markets selling fruits and vegetables alongside Cambodian silk scarves aimed at tourists, there is a bustling guesthouse industry, there are tuk-tuk drivers whose sense of direction is so bad that they can’t find your guesthouse with the aid of a map and several other tuk-tuk drivers they ask for help, there are NGOs and charities working with street children and the victims of landmines, there are monuments and museums and parks and carefully-rebuilt wats.

And there are smiles. To put this in perspective: my country bombed Cambodian cities and towns for four years, most likely escalating the Khmer Rouge hatred of all things Western that later led to them killing anyone who, among other signs of past Western connections, spoke French or English. Then, because we decided we hated the Vietnamese more than the Khmer Rouge, we sold them landmines to use against the Vietnamese -- and their own people, who continue to lose lives and limbs to this day. Then we refused to recognize the Vietnamese-backed government for twenty years, preserving the UN seat for a representative of the homicidal dictatorship hiding in the jungles.

So when people asked where I was from, I usually said “Oh, I live in Japan.” But when they really pressed and I admitted to being American, I was greeted not with the anger or bitterness I (as a representative of my nation) would’ve deserved but with delight and cheerful remarks about Obama or sports teams. To be in the presence of such grace is truly a humbling and awe-inspiring experience.

Cambodia has problems. Don’t get me wrong. The government is almost unbelievably corrupt, the poverty is crushing, the crime rate is high. Schools have only just begun teaching the history of the Khmer Rouge; many Cambodian young people, whose parents have chosen not to speak of their experiences, don’t know or don’t comprehend their own horrific recent past. (Come to think of it, I wonder if this will change the opinions Cambodians hold towards foreigners, especially Americans.)

But it is a special place. I saw the best and the worst that humanity has to offer. What I carried away with me was the best.