Making Kadomatsu and More
One fun thing about being a foreigner in Japan is that you occasionally get chances to experience aspects of traditional culture that "even Japanese people don't do very much these days," as I was repeatedly told. One of those is the making of kadomatsu (門松), which one might say is the traditional Japanese equivalent of the Western Christmas tree. But it's for New Year's, not Christmas.
Apparently the exact style differs from region to region, but in general kadomatsu are made from bamboo (竹/たけ, representing wealth) and decorated with pine (松/まつ, representing longevity). So I went up to Daigo, the northernmost extremity of Ibaraki, and thanks to the Ki no Bunka Juku culture workshop, had a wide selection of freshly felled bamboo culms to make my kadomatsu. Really, kadomatsu are supposed to come in pairs, and are placed on either side of the entrance to your home as temporary housing for gods, but to save money and because I'm living alone in a small apartment, I just made a single small one.
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I started out by cutting three 50–60 cm sections of bamboo with a hand saw, and handing them off to this gentleman pictured at right to cut one end of each section at a sharp angle. Ideally the angle cut should intersect one of the nodes of the bamboo, but two of mine were too short, so he couldn't. Then, after being painstakingly washed, the three pieces of bamboo are temporarily bound together with wire in a specific arrangement, with the one in the back sticking out the most (since all three were originally a similar length, this results in the bottoms being uneven, and so cutting the bottoms is the final step).
The next part is the trickiest. The wire keeps the three pieces of bamboo stable (more or less) while you bind them with rope. One piece of rope is wrapped three times, near the top, and another five times, near the middle. They're tied in an elaborate way that I didn't remember 10 minutes after doing it, let alone now. Then you can take off the wire, and place the bundle of bamboo inside a container made from an additional, extra-wide piece of bamboo, with seven wrappings of rope around it. Three, five, and seven have special significance in Japanese numerology.
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The last step is to pack the extra space in the big bamboo container with many sprigs of pine and one of plum, which are then carefully arranged, reminiscient of ikebana. And just like the time I tried ikebana, my arrangement was not "correct" and had to be fixed. Ah well, such is life.
At some point in the midst of the hard work of washing and tying bamboo, we took a mochi (餅) break. Though the sticky rice cake is nowadays usually made by machine, we did so the old-fashioned way, called mochitsuki, by pounding cooked glutinous rice with wooden mallets (kine) in a big wooden mortar (usu). Two people go at it in turns (or sometimes one person pounds while the other continually turns and wets the mochi), being careful to adhere to a rhythm so they don't hit each other. Mixed with nattō, the freshly-made mochi was delicious, or I'm sure it would have been if I liked nattō more.
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Another treat prepared for us by the folks at Ki no Bunka Juku was Japanese sake heated inside a long bamboo pipe, and drunk from small bamboo cups. It was very good, though my untrained palate couldn't really taste any hint of bamboo. Maybe that's good, because it means bamboo is safe to make eating utensils out of. In any case, I was so amazed by how much can be done with bamboo that I made a bamboo mug to take home for my parents.
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And here's my finished kadomatsu. Ok, fine, I'll put it at the entrance to my apartment like I'm supposed to. But just for Christmas Eve I put it in the middle of my room, put a present under it and pretended it was a Christmas tree. How's that for mixing East and West?
Ki no Bunka Juku (木の文化塾)'s homepage (Japanese only): http://www2.ocn.ne.jp/~myouga/