They are all my fault. The twins, I mean. Oh, I try to deny it. I try to lay it all on the feet of my wife, but deep down inside I know. They are my fault.
You see, there were men. Thousands of men. And they were naked. Well, mostly naked.
Perhaps I should tell this story from the beginning.
Years and years ago I wasn't The Dad. I was just Some Guy. And that Some Guy lived in a small town in Japan for a couple of years. I didn't live there alone. The Mom was there, too, but she was not yet The Mom either. She wasn't even The Wife. She was, however, the Love of My Life, nevermind the fact that we weren't even dating. Also there were Thousands of Mostly Naked Men. I wasn't dating them either.
The Thousands of Mostly Naked Men were there for the all-too appropriately named "Naked Man Festival." It's a festival that happens every year in a few towns in Japan, the most famous of which being only about 30 minutes from my apartment.
Despite the festival's name, the men are not entirely naked. They wear a fundoshi, the Japanese-style loincloth worn most famously by sumo wrestlers. But that is naked enough considering that the festival takes place outside, in February, at midnight. Picture a bizarre cross between the Polar Bear Club, a punk concert, and an extraordinarily violent Chippendale's all-male revue and you are coming close.
When I lived in Japan, I did not have the pleasure of taking part in this festival. That is not to say that I did not participate, just that my participation wasn't pleasurable. Not in the slightest.
The festival is a fairly unique event for Japanese males. It's a time when they can divorce themselves from the all-pervading idea of Japanese 'togetherness' and fight for themselves. They get drunk. They go crazy. They commit random, and some not-so-random, acts of violence. They act like Americans.
We arrived at about 8:00 PM and the first thing that struck me was the line upon line upon line of Japanese riot control troops. I didn't even know that Japan had riot control troops. What do they do for the other 364 days of the year? This, I'll admit, frightened me. The couple of inches of snow on the ground, ground that we were supposed to run over all but barefoot, frightened me. The speeches given to our group, in rapid Japanese from which I was only able to discern a few phrases, such as "not accountable" and "own risk" and "unfortunate occurrences of last year" and, possibly, "ice-cream sundae" frightened me. Standing naked and shivering in a tent crammed full of other strange, naked, shivering men frightened me a little, but not nearly as much as the maniacal grin on the face of the man who approached me holding a long strip of white cloth that turned out to be my fundoshi. (On a side note, let remark here that the worst part of wearing a fundoshi is not, in fact, the embarrassment of being dressed by someone else for the first time in my adult life, but rather the final tug to make sure that everything is in place. It's like losing a game of tug of war. In your butt.)
And all this was just the beginning. The actual event was broken in to two parts: purification and violence. In that order. I'm not sure which was worse.
Purification involved running around the temple grounds multiple times. The route included two major features: the temple fountain and the crowds of warmly dressed onlookers. When we left the changing tent it was about 10:00 PM. Snow was beginning to fall. We joined the crowds of men and joined in with the chant, "Washoi! Washoi!" Strangely, no one I've spoken to seems to know what this means. When we entered the temple grounds, the purification began with the aforementioned warmly-dressed onlookers throwing bucketfuls of water on us. Some of it was cold, which wasn't pleasant. Some of it was hot, which wasn't pleasant. We chanted our way up to the gates of the shrine, bowed to its gods, then chanting and jogging back through more crowds and their buckets, we ran straight into the waist-high pool of the temple fountain.
"Washoi! Washoi! WashOOOOOOHMYYYYYYYYGAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHD!"
When we got out of the fountain, the whole circuit repeated itself. Buckets, bowing, running, screaming, chanting Washoi! Washoi! It seemed to last for hours, forever, but it probably only went on for 30 minutes or so. At some point, by some arranged signal to which I was completely oblivious, our group of naked men, one of hundreds, ran back to the changing tent and proceeded to pound bottle after bottle of sake in preparation for the next round: Violence.
At 11:00 PM, all of the groups were herded up again, whipped into a manic, chanting, shivering, frenzied mass, and then sent out for one more round of splashing, bowing, and screaming. Then we assembled, all of us, one group after another, on the floor of the temple. For about 45 minutes, more and more men arrived and crowded in. As space grew close, a great deal of violence began erupting. Fist fights were common. I stayed close to the edge of the temple and was therefore an easy target for punches and the occasional pushing down the stairs. One gentleman I remember came up to me and kicked me twice in the chest and then head-butted me in the forehead before he was grabbed and dragged off by the riot control troops.
Maybe, I thought, the center would be safer. Certainly it was warmer.
I read later that the final estimate for the number of naked participants was just a hair short of 10,000, and as each new man crowded in, the situation quickly shifted from scary to really, really scary. We had been told beforehand to keep our arms above our heads, as with so many people crowded together, our arms could easily get twisted around, caught in between our neighbors, and snapped. Broken arms and dislocated shoulders were the most common injuries reported during the festival. That and broken ribs.
For a time, probably a minute or two, my feet left the ground. There were so many men pressed chest to chest with me that, when the crowd surged, myself and my neighbors were lifted a few inches off the ground by nothing more than the pressure of thousands of bodies pushed against each other. The seconds between surges were moments to be treasured, each breath a prize.
"Wait," I hear you say. "What does all this have to do with now, with the twins?"
Well, you see, this whole festival, this living, pulsing, sweating, naked, scary festival was all a fertility rite. At midnight, with huge flakes of snow falling all around the grounds, all of the lights suddenly went out. At this moment, from the rafters of the temple, two sticks were thrown into the crowd. Then, in the darkness, all ten thousand men surged toward the center to get a hold of one of the sticks. The melee began in earnest, with punches flying, people falling, ribs snapping, and everyone grabbing everywhere for anything that looked or felt like a big wooden stick.
There's an opportunity for a joke here, but I'll pass on it. Feel free to say it to yourself as you read.
The goal of this was to get a stick and escape the crowd, then ensure both your luck and the fertility of the year's rice crop by plunging the stick into a box filled with rice. There is also a rather significant monetary prize involved for the two winners.
So, while I did not get my hand on the prized stick, while I did not, in fact, do anything except try to suck in air and wipe away the blood in my eyes, a present from my head-butting friend, while I did not do anything but hope that the god of the temple saw fit that this scrawny white boy might live to see the sunrise, I clearly came out of the experience with an excess of fertility.
An excess of fertility great enough to cleave an egg in two. An excess in fertility great enough to make twins.
