Twisted Tanabata

It’s crazy humid and I’ve been helping students practice for an English recitation contest after school, so I can’t put much conscious effort into a post today. So instead, it’s story time. 

Tanabata is a Japanese summer holiday. Typically, it’s celebrated on July 7^th (a propitious date being 7/7) but in Sendai, they do things a little differently. I went to their Tanabata a couple weeks ago and before I went, I did a little research. 

The biggest icon, literally and figuratively, of Tanabata are very large paper decorations that for all intents and purposes look like giant jellyfish. They actually symbolize something else, but it’s kind of fun to walk the streets and pretend you’re Dory or Marlin bouncing around among the jellies! The other major decoration is bamboo. Bamboo leaves, little bamboo stalk, enormous stalks about the thickness of elephant tusks! And from their branches hang all kinds of paper decorations:

  Paper strips (Tanzaku): Good writing and study success

  Paper Kimono (Kamigoromo):  charms against disease and accidents, and wishes for good sewing   

 
  Paper Crane (Orizuru): Family safety, health and long life

  Purse (Kinchaku): Good business

 

  Net (Toami): Good fishing and harvests

  Trash Bag (Kuzukago): Cleanliness and unwastefulness

Streamers (Fukinagashi): The threads used by the goddess in her weaving

So, what’s the deal with Tanabata? (Points if you read that in Jerry Seinfeld’s voice) Keep your pants on, I’m getting to it. There are a few versions, but this one’s the most colorful.

The story of Tanabata.

 

Once upon a time in Japan, a young man was walking in the woods when he came across a pond. A young woman was bathing naked (as you tend to do when you bathe). He was amazed by how beautiful (and naked) she was…until he spotted her fabulous clothes laying on the ground. For reasons known only to himself, he snatched up the kimono and not the chick and ran like a rabbit. He could hear her crying behind him but he ran all the way home without looking back (though I’m inclined to believe she wasn’t crying so much as screaming “You son of biscuit GET BACK HERE WITH MY FUDGIN’ CLOTHES!”)

 That evening, she came to his home. She explained her name was Tanabata and she was a goddess…a goddess who wanted her freaking clothes back. But of course, he couldn’t let that happen and instead they were married. (A little creepy, no? How do you think that proposal went?) 

So they lived together for a few years, Tanabata working in their home as a weaver because her clothes were hidden in some panic vault somewhere and she couldn’t go back to heaven without them. One day, the man left the house to go to the market. As soon as he was gone, Tanabata went looking for her kimono…and she found it! She put it on just as he came home. 

As soon as she tied it, she began to rise into the sky but instead of saying “Ha ha! Got it back you jerk! Deuces!” she told him to weave a thousand straw sandals and bury them under a bamboo tree and they would BE TOGETHER AGAIN.

So what does he do? Well she ran/flew off with his hard-earned/stolen kimono. He made those sandals! As soon as he buried them, the bamboo tree began to grow. He jumped on and up they went to heaven. And there was Tanabata, chillin’ on a cloud. 

Tanabata’s father wasn’t impressed, though, and basically made the human man a slave. Finally, he made him guard a field of melons, but forbidding him to eat any. 

Of course, he nommed a melon and failed miserably and Tanabata’s father threw the Milky Way between them, dooming them to be apart forever…except for the middle of summer when the Milky Way is solid enough for them cross and be together…

Happily flawed forever after.

Another version saws Tanabata’s father arranged for them to meet and marry on July 7^th but they could only actually be with each other on that day for the rest of their lives. Which is the better story?