Tanuki on the Shore: Stumbling Drunk Through Takamatsu

Tanuki are mythical raccoon tricksters with giant magic balls. This sunday, there was a tanuki festival in Takamatsu, and by total chance I ended up in the middle of a big public square where everyone was wearing racoon hats. Also, I ended up completely drunk and wandering around a bunch of castle ruins. It was cool.
Sort of on a whim I ended up going to Takamatsu this weekend. No real reason- I just felt like I'd hop on a train to Shikoku and see what was there. Takamatsu is a decently sized city, and I thought I'd give it a look. Hip Hop asked me what I was doing this weekend, and asked if he could come along.
We got on an early train, and moved south through all manner of rural hills and ricefields. I'm continually surprised by how much "country" Japan seems to have. Sure, it's crowded country, with towns every ten minutes and rice fields clumped together, but it's rural nonetheless. We passed over the Honshu-Skikoku bridge, and I was quite taken with my first real view of the Inland Sea. I'd been to the Inland Sea before, of course, but only at night. Here, though, I was able to take in the full size of it, see it extending out in two directions and dotted with all manner of tiny islands. It was as if Honshu and Shikoku were dissolving, and little bits of them still floated in sea.
At the tanuki festival, of course, there were all manner of food vendors. Hip Hop looked at me rather sheepishly and asked "Do you wanna beer?" I felt a bit reticent- it was only about twelve thirty, and I didn't want to slide into some sort of reverie of daytime drunken degeneracy. But, I think that tanuki would have approved of my actions when I said "sure."
I still think it's weird to drink outside, but it's all legal here, so I guess it's not a problem.
We sat down and watched some kids doing taiko, which I'd never seen before- the closest I'd come was playing a taiko-themed arcade game (which I did quite enjoy, I might add).
Taiko is fairly neat to watch. Granted, we were watching kids, but the mixture of drumming, choreography, and shouting all makes it very much a performance, not just music. Really- if you were to listen to a recording of taiko drumming, you'd be losing about half of the experience of it. The kids had some decent chops, but I'd like to see a proper adult taiko performance sometime.
After that, a bunch of high school girls did a "raccoon dance." They were all dressed up in ears, tails, and makeup, and had I been a pedophile with a fur fetish I would have been pleased with it to no end.
We stumbled from the square, and made our way to the ruins of Takamatsu castle. The ruins (well, mainly just the base of the castle) were situated in a rather pleasant traditional garden with all manner of rocky steps, stone lanterns, and arching trees. It was nice. Hip Hop and I stumbled a few times as we drunkenly walked over the uneven stone steps, but managed to avoid falling like idiots.
Now, I don't want to sound like a total degenerate, but...
I'm quite glad that I'm now living the sort of life wherein if I find myself drunkenly stumbling about a bunch of castle ruins after watching a bunch of dancing girls dressed up as raccoons, I think that's more or less normal. I mean, it's not like I do that every day, but that's the sort of thing that being over here is all about- gallivanting around and doing random stuff like that.
We got some Udon (a Shikoku specialty) and looked at the Inland Sea for a while as we sobered up before catching a train home. I had a social engagement in Kurashiki later that night. There, I contented myself with oolong while everyone else got tipsy, and I splayed out in the wonderful sensation of knowing I'm somewhere else.

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