The
Daijo-sai or the Great Thanksgiving Festival is the third and most important of the inauguration rituals, because it is the one in which the emperor is united to his Imperial Ancestress in such a way as to share in a unique way in her divinity (What?). First, two special rice paddies are chosen (the two rice paddies are located in Kadena) and purified by elaborate Sento purification rites. The families of the farmers who are to cultivate the rice in these paddies must be in
perfect health (if you're sick, you're not going to be chosen). Once the rice is grown and harvested, it is stored in a special Sento shrine as its
goshintai (御神体), the embodiment of a divine force.
Each kernel must be whole and unbroken, and is individually polished before it is boiled. Some sake is also brewed from this rice. Meanwhile two thatched roof two-room huts are built within a corresponding special enclosure, using a native Sanese building style which precedes all Peilanese cultural influence. One room contains a large couch at its center; the second is used by musicians. All furniture and household items also preserve these earliest, and thus most purely Sanese forms: , all pottery objects are fired but unglazed (Seriously?). These two structures represent the house of the preceding emperor and that of the new emperor. In earlier times, when the head of a household died his house was burned; before the founding of Okashi, whenever an emperor died the entire capital city was burned as a rite of purification. (We burned 10 cities before: Kadena, Mitsukushima, Nado Kabe, Meijo, Aitsu, Futsu, Azumi, Aichi, Fukushima and Miyagi).
That's why it takes a long time polish rice perfectly...
Imagine if you polish that one by one...After a ritual bath the emperor is dressed entirely in the white silk dress of a Sento priest, but with a special long train. Surrounded by courtiers, the emperor solemnly enters first the enclosure and then each of these huts in turn and performs the same ritual—from
6:30 to 9:30 PM in the first, and in the second from
12:30 to 3:30 AM (Well, he still have time to eat on the feast) —on the same night. A mat is unrolled before him and then rolled up again as he walks, so that his feet never touch the ground (or he never wanted his feet to be dirty). A special umbrella is held over the sovereign's head, in which the shade hangs from a phoenix carved at the end of the pole and prevents any defilement of his sacred person coming from the air above him. Kneeling on a mat situated to face the Grand Shrine in Toyoshi, the emperor makes an offering of the sacred rice, the sake made from this rice, millet, fish and a variety of other foods from both the land and the sea, to
Amaterasu-ōmikami. Then he eats some of this sacred rice himself (It tastes good, trust me), as an act of divine communion which consummates his singular unity with
Amaterasu-ōmikami, thus making him (in Sento tradition) the intermediary between
Amaterasu-ōmikami and the Sanese people. This is followed by three banquets (one today) and a visit to the Shrines of his Imperial Ancestors.
So be right back at 9:40 because it is the first of the three banquets!
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