Turning art of navel-gazing into a fully-fledged festival

The central Japanese city of Shibukawa is home to an annual festival in honour of the humble belly button – a celebration of that part of the body which starts out as a lifeline and ends up as a portal to gather fluff off your new jumper.

Shibukawa, which lies north of Tokyo, has been calling itself the ‘belly button of Japan’ since 1984 – because it is located at the very centre of country. And that was the same year it first hosted the Heso Matsuri – or in English, the Belly Button Festival.

Highlight of this two-day event at the end of July is the Belly Button Dance Parade where people of all ages come to dance with their belly buttons out.

In some cases that may well be attractive to watch – after all the art of belly-dancing has its global audience – but for others the quest is not so much the dancing as the search for said belly button in the first place.

However, once located, the locals accentuate the beauty of the belly button by painting faces across their torsos leading down to the object of admiration itself, which is ten usually painted as a mouth.

Participants then wrap a kimono around their waists and the person’s real head is hidden by a large cloth hat.

In fairness, there are more bizarre festivals around the world – not least without leaving Japan where the Kanamara Matsuri Festival honours the penis with a parade of giant plastic phalluses – but it’s a hard sell to plan your annual holidays around a navel celebration.

But the Japanese recognise the belly button as the very point where life begins, and the Hindus go even further, believing that a lotus emerged from the god Vishnu’s navel, and at the centre of the flower was Brahma – creator of the universe.

The belly button is something of an anathema for Christians – at least those who buy into the whole story of Adam and Eve. Because if the original twosome didn’t have a mammy, then they didn’t have umbilical cords, so why would they have a belly button?

Of course, if they did have the same mammy, then the rest of were born of a brother and sister, which puts any unease over the belly button into the ha’penny place.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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