Yume, On Location: Turns Out the Drums Aren't Angry — They're Talking

No stream this time. Phone stayed in my pocket, and I went to Fukagawa's joint clan autumn festival (previously reported) as a plain old visitor. My job is usually talking from outside the cordon tape, so walking through a festival without a camera up felt weirdly awkward at first — I didn't know what to do with my hands.

I happened to be standing there when the dog-line drums and the bear-line drums started going back and forth, and honestly, at first I thought the dog-line drumming just sounded really angry. Fast and loud. But the longer I listened, the more I realized that wasn't it at all. There's an actual pause after each burst of fast drumming. Turns out that pause is there for the bear-line drum to answer. The bear-line side is slow, but the length of that pause is different every single time, in a way that somehow got my heart racing a little. I told someone at the office about it and they laughed and said, "That's called a conversation, you know." Fair.

The food stalls matched what the article said too — dog-line stuff is strong-flavored and sized to finish in one go, bear-line stuff is seasoned heavier because it's meant to keep. Seeing both side by side, I had this delayed, obvious realization: of course the way people live shapes how they season their food. I'm a Drifter half myself, with a great-grandmother who was first-generation, and it hit me that night that I'd never actually sat down and listened to clan drumming or clan cooking stories properly before.

I went up to the two organizers — one dog-line, one bear-line — and they said, "Glad you came without streaming this time, Yume." I got a little embarrassed. Apparently they want to invite Kameido's fox-line association next year. That's going to be good. I might stream it next year, but I'm glad this year I got to just be a guest.