Buying Your Luck
Japan’s Festival of Good Fortune
On certain November nights in Tokyo you may find yourself in a crowd drawn to Hanazono Shrine in Shinjuku’s San-chome district.Walking by the tourist hotspot of Golden Gai you’ll spy a line a yatai food stalls stretching down the street ahead, nearby shop doorways full of people munching on grilled chicken, plastic trays piled high with yaki-soba and the sad salt-crusted bodies of contorted fish skewered and grilled on chopsticks. Jostled in a press of bodies, wafts of meaty smoke tarring your nostrils and the chants of the approaching festival erupting ahead, the Tori No Ichi festival experience is a heady treat for all the senses.
Navigating the crush of bodies to the main square of the Hanazono shrine, a thick queue of people waits to pray to the otori-sama (the god of good fortune). Off to one side a pile of bamboo sticks, discarded daruma and various other gaudy items accumulate on a blue tarp. These are the previous year’s kumade — lucky charms for business and good fortune. I have been been told shrine burns the kumade, smoke scattering up to the heavens to meet the goodwill of the otori-sama, but it seems highly unlikely that the Tokyo Fire Department would permit the burning of thousands of bits of bamboo and plastic in the middle of Shinjuku’s cramped confines.
