---

Samurai Movies (21)

February 24, 2022

[Sake] The funniest scene of the movie 'Yaji Kita dochu Teresko' appeared at an inn where Yaji and Kita stayed. At night, in the inn, all of the travelers were taking dinner together in a big tatami-mat room. They were sitting at their particular 'ozen', a tray with legs, on which a person's food was served. Some of them were drinking. The room was noisy with all of their conversations. Only Kita was quiet. He was sitting on the bottom step of the staircase eating a whole of 'yokan' bar, sweet bean jelly. He was still depressed by his big mistake in a Kabuki performance in Edo. Two guys coincidently started to talk about the Kabuki performance of which one of them had heard what happened in the play. They made fun of the performer who made the mistake saying, he was an incredible idiot. Of course they didn't know it was Kita. One of them noticed Kita on the stairs and invited him to drink with them. Kita declined because he had promised Yaji not to drink during the trip, thus Yaji let Kita join the trip. But the two guys insisted and, at last, Kita accepted their offer and started to drink. Yaji was in his room on the second floor and heard a big sound and screams from downstairs. He went down, and saw the room. It was supposed to be a fun eating place, but now it was like Hell, or after a typhoon. The two guys who had made fun of Kita were breathing heavily, lying on the floor, their chonmages were loosened, and their hair covered their faces, which had bumps and bruises. The other males were also laid out on the floor, and the females were trembling in the corner. On top of several piled up tatami-mats, Kita was sitting wearing a hachimaki on his head and drinking sake from a big bowl. Yaji went up to Kita and asked, "Did you drink?" Kita's eyes were glazed, "Is it wrong to drink?" His character had completely changed. Yaji had to say, "No." The next scene was that all the people, except Kita and Yagi, were energetically dancing a strange dance to a chant. Yaji was dancing reluctantly, Kita was cheering them on.   Yaji knew that Kita had a habit of changing his character after drinking, so he made Kita promise not to drink, although it was in vain.   When he started to work, there were a certain number of people who would change their character after drinking. His section boss was one of them. It was at a year-end party of his section, which took place at a hot spring inn. After the party, when he was going to his room to sleep, he realized that his boss was shouting something in the lobby and the manager was trying to calm him down. He apologized to the manager and soothed over his boss, and managed to take him to his shared room. But, the boss's shared room was locked. His roommates had locked him out because they knew that he had this habit! He tried the other rooms, including his own room, but they were the same. He gave up to go to sleep, and so he went back to the lobby and talked with his boss until the next morning. This might be an extreme case, but he often witnessed that some of his seniors would fight, break something, etc. As he got older, this type of nonsense decreased. Now he felt nostalgic for those days. At that time, maybe people had more stress, maybe alcohol's quality had been worse, and, he could say, maybe people had been more generous towards drinkers. The tradition must have been passed from the Edo Period. When he was young there was a popular 'minyo' in which a guy named Shosuke, had three things he preferred to do in the morning: sleeping, drinking, and taking a bath. He finally lost all of his property. Maybe these lyrics were written to teach us as a lesson. He read that in his han there were about 200 sake makers in the Edo Period. (Now there are 22 in his prefecture.) Skillful workers were called 'toji', his han's 'toji' were called 'Nambu toji', and were counted in the three major toji in the Edo Period. Some of these workers went to other hans to work and to teach them how to make good sake. But, he wondered how this, making sake, had continually lasted in the Edo Period when there were a lot of famines and a lot of people died of starvation in this han. Sake is made of rice. (To be continued ...)

No. 467




*bump :こぶ
*bruise :あざ
*glazed :うつろな
*in vain :無駄な
*soothe :なだめる
*witness :目撃する