You may recall (from my shrine-closing ceremony post last fall) photos of a Shinto rite of hope and good fortune of some sort, involving the burning of small sticks that had people's names and ages on them. As the sticks burned, the wishes and hopes of the person rose with the smoke (to the gods, I guess).

As I hinted with the Hot Stuff post the other day, this rite was done as part of the Setsubun events at the Heian Shrine.

At the shrine-closing ceremony, perhaps 60 sticks were burnt. At the Heian Shrine this past Sunday, about 40,000 were burnt.

There were two pyres, constructed mostly of wet-looking evergreens, along with a bunch of the “hope sticks” (I don't know what they're really called) arranged in a lattice for quick combustion, just as seen in the shrine-closing post. Large logs provided the shell/support for each pyre.

The pyres were lighted from the flames brought in the two boxes, and heavy smoke was soon billowing. The shot below was taken just a minute and a half after they were lit.

The first large flames started shooting out less than a minute later, and soon after they were a raging inferno. The bulk of the hope sticks had yet to be added.

It was at about the time the pyres were really burning full tilt that I suddenly remembered the sermon from Mass earlier in the day. The priest had talked of a group of 50-some Kyoto Catholics that were burnt at the stake in October 1618 for committing the offense of being Christian. One of the families included a pregnant mother and six of her other children.

According to a Japanese account of the incident, the guy in charge of carrying out the executions made sure to pile the wood close and high. He knew some of the accused, he said, and wanted their deaths to be quick. How civilized.

Anyway, that was 400 years ago; today, the flames were fed only by wood.

The priests chanted nonstop, using microphones to broadcast the chant to the wider audience (although no one could understand what they were chanting; if it was in Japanese, it was sufficiently archaic to be unintelligible even to native speakers).

I used a fast shutter for most of these pictures: the “Intense” shot above is at 1/2000^th second. The photo on the hot-stuff post is even faster at 1/2500^th second. The flames were really whipping about, so I tried a slower shutter to blur the flames a bit...

After about seven minutes of mostly intense, angry flames, came time to burn the hope sticks that awaited on pallets. Each pallet had 168 bundles of 50 sticks each, yielding 16,800 sticks to be added. The younger priests started throwing them, but from a distance because it was really hot.

Two young guys worked the fires with long mental poles, pulling embers out so that air could get in, and otherwise tending the fires. They were in the heat and the smoke the whole time, and they did not look like they were having fun.

Thirty minutes after it started, it was over, and the fire brigade came in to clean up.

Continued here...