Man, I hope there was some kinda hilarious story behind why you have a toilet bowl in your living room, or that's just kinda gross.
Anyway, I recently joined in on my local area's Dragon Festival, which culminated in a big fireworks-enhanced parade with a bunch of Japanese guys (and me) running all over the place with these giant paper dragons while people cheered and threw water and beer at us (both literally and figuratively).
When I signed up, there were a few 'practice' sessions, which were more like mini-performances since we had huge audiences each time and practically no instruction. We even wore the traditional Dragon-carrying garb and were accompanied by our backup drummers each time except the very first one. And on that first practice, we were even made to run under streaming fireworks, which admittedly, was pretty awesome, though I kept thinking the dragon was going to catch on fire.
The traditional "let's get drunk and carry a giant paper dragon up a mountain" attire consists primarily of bandages and white shorts that tie up in the back (Oh Japan...). There's also the tabi shoes, which are like plastic toe-socks with rubber tread. They had to special-order a pair for me since I'm roughly twice their normal sizes. The other Dragon guys had fun trying on my clown shoes and cracking jokes about my obviously-huge penis size. Japanese humor is so oddly self-effacing.
The day of the main festival, each of the five dragon teams went wandering around a different area of the city with our respectively-colored paper dragons, posing for pictures with kids and getting sunburned since the only things we were wearing were bandages and shorts. Also, some Buddhist monk guys tagged along, throwing refreshing water on us sporadically and collecting donations from townsfolk. Also part of our merry band were the sexy yukata-wearing girls who played the instruments for our Dragon team's various performances where we'd stop alongside the road where a bunch of people had gathered for the Japanese equivalent of a barbecue and we'd show up and bust into a run tossing the Dragon up and down and zigzagging in weird patterns while shouting nonsense Japanese "So-re... waSHOI~!" ...I'm told that it doesn't really have an actual meaning, it's just what you shout when you're carrying things at a festival. So I guess it might translate to something like "Whoo-hoo!" or "Huzzah".
Being the only foreigner and the English teacher at the largest elementary school in the whole 5-city area, I drew a lot of attention and a ton of my students would run up to me, shocked and excited, while their mothers took pictures of them half-carrying (it was way too heavy for most of them, so we helped hold it) the Dragon with their "Sensei".
So we did that from noon until 6 PM, when we loaded up on the trucks and headed out to the main festival grounds where we were to meet up with all the other Dragon teams for a co-op performance. There were five Dragons in all, each a different color: Green, Blue, Gold, Silver, and Red. I was on the awesome Red team, of course. How the teams worked was that each carrier position on the giant paper Dragon had 2 or 3 people assigned to it, and we would trade out mid-performance so that no one got so tired that they dropped the Dragon. The head and tail positions had roughly 6 or so people assigned to each because those were the only parts of the Dragons made from molded plaster instead of paper. There was also a hose running through it where we could hook up a tank and the Dragons could spew fire and steam out of their mouths, which looked pretty damn impressive.
The whole thing finished up when all five Dragons gathered at the top of the hill where everyone could see us under the flaring torches and spotlights. Three of the Dragons coiled up, spewing sparks or smoke at one another, and the others circled around them at top speed, everyone jumping and shouting and cheering, while the drums blared and the firecrackers popped.
Afterwards, we all got free food and beer and we hit on the sexy yukata girls. And they all lived happily ever after.
