The news is flushing out my siblings lately.
Just as my sister Debbie showed up in Chicago, Pope Leo XIV went under the knife for lung cancer. Deb has been kicking cancer's ass for years, so tapping her wisdom seemed a no-brainer.
Several readers replied, "You have a sister?" Well, I'm supposed to be writing a column for a Chicago newspaper, not a chatty meet-the-family Christmas letter.
And yet. News has a will of its own.
Now it's my younger brother's turn. Sam is no stranger to readers, particularly of my books. It is he who bails me out of jail in "Drunkard." He's also a plot point in "You Were Never in Chicago," as I trace the classic newcomer's path of coming here, getting a job, then bringing family to Chicago and helping them get jobs. I rented an apartment with a spare bedroom on Logan Boulevard, and enticed him to move here from Tokyo, where his apartment was so small I could span its width with my arms spread and one foot planted on the floor. And I have short arms.
Sam still has the Big Love for Japan, and goes back often. He and his wife Yuri were there when my sister showed up, which would have not been the stuff of a column, except for one reason he went — to participate in the Danjiri Matsuri — an annual fall festival where huge wooden floats are maneuvered through the streets by acolytes wearing cotton happi coats.
I knew it was dangerous — the festival is sort of a Japanese running of the bulls at Pamplona: a chance to party in the street, risk being killed, and survive. I thought of telling him, "Don't get crushed." But that seemed a prissy, older brother concern.
What I said instead was, "I want to see a picture." Because he can fall down in that department. I would have left it at that. Then two participants were crushed to death in Osaka, and 16 injured. The New York Times found four others who died in 2022 and 2023. Suddenly, I was sitting on a big international news story, so designated Sam as a Sun-Times foreign correspondent and got to work.
Weren't you worried about being killed?
"Obviously, there is some trepidation regarding that," Sam said. "It's not lost on us that this is a dangerous event, that people get hurt all the time. After your shoulder injury, I [worried] I'm going to be next."
Those carrying the floats chant, "Yoisho, ja!" — basically, "Heave ho!" What's that like?
"There are danjiri where you have 200 people carrying it," he said. "Very very big. This one is more like 40 or 50 people. You have five or six different shrines going around at any one time. It was interesting. They gave out rice balls, onigiri. Everyone is wearing the same outfit — happi coats, shorts. They told everyone to bring a towel and put it under their happi coat, so you don't wreck your shoulder. Everyone is given a number. Very Japanese, very efficient. You stand by your number and go lift it up once, then put it back down. Starting slow. You do a couple laps around the shrine, lifting the shrine higher above your head, shaking it, bringing it back down."
I assumed it is a well-lubricated undertaking.
"There's a little bit of that," said my brother, who had a single beer beforehand. "Alcohol is definitely part of the equation. Also part of why it becomes more dangerous."
And what are you thinking during this?
"My main thought was: 'I don't want this coming down on my shoulder.' On average, I'm pretty tall, compared to most people there. The way the physics of the turn works, a lot of weight starts to fulcrum. It's not that long lasting, but you do have that point where you feel like, 'God, this is a lot of weight.'"
I'm not sure I'd go to the corner of Shermer and Walters to participate. What made it worth flying to Japan to do?
"I like the whole idea of doing a testosterone-laden guy thing," Sam said. "There's not a lot of opportunity to do that kind of stuff in the United States."
The takeaway: it was fun; he didn't die.
"It was a very cool experience," he said. "I'm ready to go back and do it again next year."
Somehow, that reasoning was surprisingly persuasive. A decade ago we took the shinkansen — the bullet train — together across Japan, to Kumamoto, to attend the birthday party of a teddy bear. This struck me as a similarly worthy event.
"Maybe I will go with you," I said. Because really, how often do you get the chance?
