I keep promising myself that I’ll abandon the obligatory scan of the Calendar of Events whenever I arrive in an unfamiliar country or city.It’snever been worth the frustration.

            I always seem to arrive in town the very day after the annual Nude Teenage Drum Majorette Memorial March-Past. Or I’m eagerly scanning a riverbank six weeks after the Elks’Draagon Boat Regatta and Fund-Raising Fish Fry, or I’m in position down by the town square months after the final embers of the Pumpkin Harvest Bonfire have been extinguished.

The only time I ever seem to witness a highlight of a distant port’ssocial and cultural calendar is by accident. I had once been in Bombay less than an hour,

Offloaded from a delayed aircraft en route to another part of the subcontinent altogether, when I found myself swept along in a loud and colourful train of humanity toward Chowpatty Beach, where I was almost deposited in the putrid water along with a garland-draped effigy of the elephant-trunked Ganesh, the munificent God of Wisdom. By the time I discovered the reason for the joyful clamour, it had been reduced to the strangled moans of beggars trampled in the rush.

            Given my track record for unsuccessfully scheduling arrival and occasion, I shouldn’t have bothered to consult the  weighty guide to the Japanese castle city of Kanazawa when I found myself approaching its precincts on May 21. No doubt I would be weeks or months away from the Fish Cleaning Festival or the ancient mushi-okuri ritual  to rid the villages of mosquitos (“farm boys beat big drums and march with torches through the rice fields”)

            However, I gave in to habit, consulted away hopefully, and rung up a jackpot that just about sent me off to the nearest pachinko parlour to try and further my good fortune. There actually was an entry for May 21;one of only three for the second half of the month. It read: “The hemorrhoid curing Buddha is on display at Sanboji in Higashiyama.”

            Although I had been hoping for an eventthat would allow me to partake of complimentary rice cakes and sushi,distributed by beaming and demure samurai-descended geishas slumming it in the local park, I thought I might as well settle for a privileged glimpse of theis remarkably empowered Buddha. Off, I instructed my driver, to the Sanboji temple! After all, the next display was not scheduled until September, by which time I would no doubt be off missing a Saharan camel race by a matter of hours.

            Winding through the almost impossibly narrow Kanazawa streets, I consulted Kanazawa-The Other Side of Japan by Ruth Stevens, a veritable treasure chest of Practical information concerning arcane Nippon practices. “The temple found itself in business,” she informs, “during the Edo period when a dying parishioner dedicated himself as a Buddha to help fellow-sufferers of the then-untreatable malady. His five-tiered grave, in a corner of the front garden, was visited byan increasing number of people plagued by piles. As their prayers were answered and word spread, the temple began dispensing medicines and incantations. Today the priest will chant the sutras and hand out a soothing salve and a packet of red pills, made of shredded paper brushed with holy words.”

            I mounted the temple steps in reasonable expectation of encountering a shuffling, fidgeting queue before the merciful Buddha. Such, in the land of advanced, was not the case. There were but a few aged petitioners, all so removed from apparent discomfort as to appear absolutely beatific. There was to be no casting aside of sticks and offering of fervent thanks to the heavens on this occasion.

            The Buddha itself, a jolly little figure mounted aloft behind glass and away from the ever-drifting incense smoke, gave no visual indication of its highly specialized powers. Had I not been made aware by the Kanazawa Calendar of Events, I would not have readily attributed any curative capacities to it. Soothing salve was nowhere to be seen. Had I been a sufferer, my disappointment would have been truly unbounded.

            Unable to disguise my crestfallen state, I attracted the attention of a priest, who informed me that on the days other than May 21 and September 21, other merciful acts were on the agenda. I again consulted Ms Stevens, who advised; “The altar on the right is crowded with pictures of grateful people cured by Sanboji’s other service-a general purpose Buddhist exorcism in which a mysteriously gifted person takes on the ills of the supplicants. Until she recently became ill herself, the exorcist was a spiritual old woman whose success was legend among local temples.”

            That did it. If even the general purpose exorcism was on hold, there was little point in continuing to darken the tiny temple’s(rather ornate) doorway. I left Kanazawa promptly the next morning. A guidebook for a nearby town promised a memorial service at a university hospital for the souls of rabbits, mice and dogs used in their experiments. It only appeared on the calendar once a year, so it would have been a terrible shame to pass it up. I’ve never quite got over missing those Nude Teenage Drum Majorettes.