Fighting Festival

Last week we went to a Fighting Festival in southern Himeji, near our home in Western Japan. This is a large and famous festival, in which the members of seven different villages compete for the title of last shrine standing.
Looking back on the event I must say that it is an immense "MANFEST", with everything that a "man's man" would want in a festival. It is a festival in which any man can dress down to nearly nothing, yell, scream, spit and scratch wherever he wants, show great pride in his village, and with all his buddies lift things which are way too heavy for them, all the while flirting within inches of almost certain death. I must say, this makes a football and beer weekend look rather tame! In the year before the festival the men of each village build these immense and detailed shrines, with wood, tin, and gold and fitted with a huge drum in the middle. Scores of men lift these things while four drummers sit in the middle beating a tune. They "fight" by pushing up against the other villages' shrine while the men are lifting it. As you can imagine, if you are lifting a one ton shrine, this can get pretty dangerous.
The winner seems to be the team who doesn't drop their shrine, or trample one of their own members. One of the craziest things about this is that the massive and pressing crowds are not safely in the grand stands, but down in and amidst the fighting, getting pushed around and in rare cases, getting injured. It is pretty intense, and the men (who often arrive at the event rather drunk, which is strange seeing as it begins just before noon!) get pretty riled up. It was not unusual to see fist-fights breaking out, or hear the shrill of Fox 40 whistles as limp bodies were removed from amidst the chaotic sea of men.
Before I get too far along, I must mention that it is not "just" a man's event, it really was set up for the whole family. This is one of the few events in which grown men, dressed only in loin cloths, cuddled their infant sons in public, and encouraged their teenagers to be even MORE rowdy and noisy. Young mothers walked amid the screaming throng holding their toddlers in one arm, and a video camera in the other, and old men (who were thankfully not required to wear the loincloths) gathered together, joking and reminiscing about when they were young. Yeah, I must say, this festival really was one of a kind.