The Lantern That Waits a Year

Begin not with the harbor but with a float. Its skeleton is bamboo bent by hand and bound with wire, and over that frame the makers paste washi in layer upon patient layer, until the ribs disappear beneath skin. Then the painter comes with his brushes and gives the paper a face — a warrior, a demon, a figure out of some old tale whose name the children still know. A lamp is set inside. This is not a craft learned in a hurry for the season; it is the accumulation of many winters, kept in rooms like the Wa Rasse hall the way a house keeps its oldest things. To know Aomori through this object is to know it more truly than through any photograph of its water.

The nights the floats go into the streets are the Nebuta Matsuri. One by one the great lanterns pass, and the drums come down into the chest before the ear has fully caught them, and the flutes lift the mood as smoke lifts, and the dancers thread the lantern-shadows in time. The light floats upon the dark; the drum sinks into the bone. For a few short days the city lets go of its northern restraint and shows the deepest color the summer holds. But this ardor rises from nowhere miraculous. It is only the result of bamboo and paper that have waited out a whole year in the dark of a storehouse.

When the festival disperses, the ordinary days are not empty. Along the bay the ASPAM tower stands, and the walking-scale streets keep the water near, and beside the station the A-Factory turns the apple into a local air one can almost drink. The city joins harbor to craft to fruit to festival, and lets them hold one another up. Walk a while and the time here begins to feel like the wind off the sea — light to the eye, and yet it settles on the shoulders with a weight.

The history is no late ornament either. Aomori faces Mutsu Bay, and for long years it took in the sea-roads of the far northeast and the plain business of living, so that it carries both a port's openness and the guarded quiet of a northern town. The festival was never a performance hung above the city. It breathes with the harbor and the dark and the hands that made it, relighting in the year's shortest and brightest week everything the place has slowly gathered.

Go back afterward, in daylight, into the storehouse. One frame stands there unfinished and unlit — bamboo lashed to bamboo, half its washi still to come, the marks of the hands plain along every rib. No lamp burns in it yet. It is only waiting, as the whole city waits, to be given a face and a fire and its single night.