A Japanese Shintō Parade

This chapter deals with a local Shintō festival which is held once every eighteen years, ² and in which the central event is a parade through the community of Shingū. ³ None of the participants in the 1988 festival could give the anthropologist the ‘meaning’ of all the paraphernalia carried in the parade or of all the rituals performed during the festival, although a few could articulate what some of the objects and rites ‘meant’ to them. Only one participant – the Shintō priest – could give an interpretation of most of the festival's many different parts, although frequently only after looking them up in some authoritative handbook for Shintō priests. ⁴ Most people had only vague ideas about the significance of the festival, and those who voiced an opinion were by no means agreed as to its interpretation. This bears out Caillet's observation (1986:35) that a ritual day in Japan ‘does not seem to have a finite, limited meaning in itself. It is just a moment where human and divine worlds come into contact, a moment the significance of which is not clearly stated’.