No Blues From This Wintry Dip in 2007
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| Misogi Participants purify themselves with freezing cold water |
TIME: 2nd Saturday of January around 11
PLACE: Kanda Myojin Shrine, Tokyo
GETTING THERE: Ochanomizu Stn from JR Line and Maranouchi Subway
Misogi is an ascetic practice of ritual purification in which the participants immerse themselves in freezing cold water. This activity takes place in Winter typically close to New Years at many temples and shrines throughout Japan and special places along rivers and at waterfalls especially in the mountains. Misogi participants will wear white which represents purity. The men wear only a loincloth known as a fundoshi and a headband. Women will wear a kimono and headband.
At Kanda Myojin Shrine the participants do a "warm-up" both mentally and physically before stepping into a pool of water with chunks of ice floating in it. They take wooden buckets and splash themselves vigorously with them. After everyone in the group has done their cold water purification, they do more stretching and chanting.
This is from an article I wrote for OhMyNews several years ago when Tokyo had a very mild January
Recently an annual purification ritual at Tokyo's Kanda Myojin Shrine was held. The ritual involved men and women jumping into a shallow pool of freezing cold natural water and showering themselves vigorously with bucketfuls of icy water. These purification-through-freezing-water rituals known as Misogi are often held in winter to display the fierce dedication of the participants.
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| Young girls brave the cold water and the warm winter |
Most winters, particularly the record cold one last year, this ritual would be viewed as brave, strong, and more than a little insane. However, this winter, given the abnormally warm temperatures, it actually looked rather refreshing.
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| Preparing For Their Refreshing Wintry Dip |
With the exception of a few storms here and there, Japan's winter has been exceptionally warm this year. This is in sharp contrast to last year when record snowfalls blanketed the northwestern coast and over a hundred people died in snow-related injuries.
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| Heavy snowfall last winter In Nagano |
Even Tokyo was hit with a significant amount of snow.
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| Last winter's snow in Ueno Park in Tokyo |
The winter has also been conspicuously late in coming. Autumn leaf viewing has long been a popular tradition in Japan, but usually in autumn! Autumn and winter seemed to have set their seasonal alarm clocks rather late. People were viewing autumn leaves in Kyoto as late as New Year's Eve!
A number of Japanese ski slopes only received their first heavy snow within the last few weeks. Several skiing events had to be canceled or relocated to better slopes.
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The warm weather is not only in Japan. Prior to the ice storms now sweeping across much of the US, the weather in many places felt like a fine day in April rather than January. The ice storms themselves are byproduct of the unnaturally warm weather.
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Perhaps former U.S. Vice President Al Gore saw the Kanda Myojin Shrine event and took note of the lack of blue skin of the participants, because he was in Japan recently urging Japanese business leaders to set the example for the world to follow on environmental policies.
Gore mentioned Japan's unusually warm winter, and the early blooming cherry blossoms in Washington D.C. were also ominous signs that not all was well.
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| Stretching out their cold limbs after their dip |
"Our planet now has a fever. And it's not going away," Gore said. "We have a moral obligation to those coming after us."
Gore was also promoting his documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth.
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| Obvilously smarter than us, the Japanese snow monkey prefers a hot bath to a cold one in winter |
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