Kawagoe Matsuri 2014 – Ladder Acrobatics

Every time I visit a festival in Kawagoe City just north of Tokyo I make a point of seeing the ladder acrobatics performance by the local firefighters, one of my favorite teams. This year’s Kawagoe Matsuri had perfect weather for ladder acrobatics, not windy at all and no rain at all. Thanks to that they put on a great show with even the most difficult of positions. The stark difference between the firefighters lit by other people’s camera flashes and ambient street lighting contrasted with the pictch black night sky was pretty effective!

More Ladder Acrobatics in Kawagoe

More of the fantastic ladder acrobatics as performed by Saitama prefecture firefighters at the Kawagoe Harumatsuri (Kawagoe City Spring Festival) opening day at the end of March 2014. The ladder is simple and handmade out of hemp rope and bamboo poles. The only thing that keeps it upright is the support of the hooks and bills applied by the team members on the ground. The method allowed firefighting teams in the Edo period of Japan to quickly and safely raise the ladders anytime and anywhere in matter of seconds, regardless of conditions. Ladders were not used only to scale walls or buildings, but also as mobile observation platforms to find fires and routes in the densely packed wooden cities of Japan. The traditions are being kept alive by the modern firefighters although in those days the positions were often hereditary and passed down through special families of samurai or commoners tasked with keeping an eye on fires. The official system that we can see in these performances was introduced in 1720.

Tokyo, or Edo as it was known then, was famous for its many fires. People in other parts of Japan even made fun of Edo by coining the saying 火事と喧嘩は江戸の花 (“Quarrels and fires are the flowers of Edo”, in Japanese to be the flower of something is the be the pride and joy, the finest and the best). During the 267 years of the Edo period (1601-1867) there were 49 massive fires in the city, ten times as many as in the other large cities of Japan. If you include smaller firest there were a couple of thousand during the Edo period. The number of fires increased as the population growth and the inability of the Shogunate government (the feudal ruler of Japan) to handle the growth of the city is part of the reason why the Emperor was able to regain government control of the country in 1868. Without the many fires of Edo this blog could have been called Edobling. The greatest fire of Edo was in 1657 when 107 000 people were killed (about one fifth of the total population). Compared to the 8 official deaths of the great fire of London 1666 it seems even larger. The worst months of the year for fires was in January, February and March, when strong winds, cold and dry weather mean that even small household accidents could easily sweep the entire city if left unchecked. People were so afraid of these fires that many men who had relations outside of the city sent their wives to the countryside in these three months.

Kawagoe Ladder Acrobatics – Harumatsuri

Of all the photographic subject available in this fantastic country few beats the ladder acrobatics for photogenics! These teams of gravity defying fire fighters are really something to see. I took saw the Saitama prefecture Kawagoe city team at the Kawagoe spring festival opening last week. In the old days samurai families tasked with fighting fires in the cities of Japan developed a technique of quickly and safely raising ladders using not much beyond bamboo, ropes and hooks. The bravest would then race up the ladder and quickly be able to locate the source of the fire and the direction it was likely to travel in. A low tech solution to problems faced by firefighters in many cultures. To keep their skill up the teams would practice on the ladders in a form of acrobatics that is now the “hashigonori engi” (梯子乗り演技). There are different traditions but most of them center on a dozen core positions centered around where on the ladder they are performed (up, middle or moving downwards). Most teams follow the traditional 69 positions although very few of them are every used be the individual teams. Can you spot the position called the “sea turtle”?

There are even some extremely scary looking two man positions that I have never seen in real life (not to be confused with bigger ladder teams where two or three men do their own routines on different parts of the ladder at the same time). I took so many photos of their three different performances on this day so I will a second bunch of photos for later. Enjoy!

Kawagoe Matsuri – Ladder Acrobatics

I had totally forgotten about it but at the Kawagoe Matsuri it is customary for the local firefighters to perform a traditional display of ladder acrobatics. This was a skill they developed during the eco period of Japan, when the civic government of Japan rapidly advanced and firefighting became vitally important to create the prospering cities. The cities were dense and built entirely in wood so in case of fire, the local firefighters literally had not a second to spare. One way for them to quickly locate the fire was the ability to raise a ladder anywhere within seconds and send a scout straight up to locate the source of the flames. The pole with the leather strips were used to gauge the direction of the winds and to figure out where the flames were likely to be headed. The firefighters would then use their hooks to pull down any building in the path of the fire. Since Japanese buildings were all light timber frame without any nails this was actually a plausible way of stopping the fire from spreading. The task of actually putting out the flames went to the local towns people who by law had to be prepared with buckets that were always filled with water. You can still see these buckets in the older towns of Japan. The importance of being able to perform all these tasks led to the firefighters developing great technique and this skill is still preserved today in these traditional performances. Readers of this blog will know that these performances are some of my absolute favorites here in Japan, and especially the local team of Kawagoe here in Saitama prefecture. The rain had just stopped so the team could briefly perform a slimmed down version of their normal set. Rain makes the bamboo ladders very slippery and very dangerous. Use the tags to find more photos that I have taken of this fantastic tradition!

Oh, and as a bonus you can see that I managed to snap a photo at the exact moment another photographer snapped a photo right in front of me. The intensly brief flash was captured perfectly! How’s that for good timing?