Kanzui Matsuri part 8

This is the second half of a post on the Oeyama dance as performed at last years matsuri up in Kanzui, The first half can be found here.

The group of heroes dressed as yamabushi find their way to the demons lair and after convincing the demons that they are real yamabushi are invited to spend the night,

There are 4 heroes, and the boss demon and three aides, so a total of 8 dancers packed into the tiny performance space. The king of the demons is distinguished by his oversized mask.

The heroes share the drugged sake with the demons and when they are drunk the fighting begins, each hero putting paid to one demon.

The final scene is when the king demon is confronted by the main hero. But the demon has a trick up his sleeve,..... a demon spider....

I had not seen the spiderweb and spider used in the Oeyama dance before...

The hero of course defeats the spider and the demon and so the world is once again safe.....

It was now 3:30 am and the kagura would be going on for another 3 hours but I left as I felt I neede to put in an appearance at my own villages matsuri which was also being held this night....

Kanzui Matsuri 7

The next dance at last years all-night matsuri in Kanzui was Oeyama, a big production with an unusually large cast for a kagura dance so I will split it into two posts. the story is based on a Noh play of the same name which itself was based on a story in the Heike Monogatari. In the first scene the hero, Minamoto Yorimitsu, and an aide leave Kyoto on a mission to destroy demons that have been kidnapping and eating young women.  On the way they meet a tengu/yamabushi who tells them that the demon will not harm yamabushi so they should discard their armor and wear the garb of mountain priests. the tengu also gives them some drugged sake that will disable demons but not affect humans.

The next scene introduces a villager who works in the mountains as a woodsman.

The next scene introduces a princess who is found in the mountains washing bloodstained clothes in a stream. She was captured by the demons but her flesh was too tough and bones too large to be eaten so the demons kept her as a laundry maid.

She promises to guide them, now dressed as yamabushi, to the demons lair on Mount Oeyama.

Kanzui Matsuri 6

So, it's about one-thirty in the morning and the sixth dance of the matsuri begins, Daikoku and Ebisu.

There is not really a story, rather the two characters, both members of the 7 Lucky Gods of Japan, engage in pantomime.

Daikoku was originally a Hindu warrior deity, but in Japan by the 15th century he had become the jolly, pudgy character associated with wealth and good fortune. Hitting the people on the head with his magic mallet will bring them good fortune.

When Ebisu dances he often goes through the comedic routine of catching a Sea Bream.

Daikoku and Ebisu are often seen as a father-son pair through the association with Okuninushi (written with the same kanji as daikoku) and Kotoshironushi, seen as Ebisu.

What the kids in the audience have been waiting for is for the lucky candy that Ebisu throws out.....

Kanzui Matsuri 5

Suzukayama is another hero versus demon piece based on a Noh drama.
The hero is Sakanoue Tamuramaro who was given the title of shogun (barbarian defeating generalissimo) for his success in defeating the Emishi in eastern and northern Japan. I believe he founded the famous Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto.

There are many variations on the story, but this version seems to be based on the version of the story that has the demon being a "dog demon". Other versions have the demon being invisible.

The demon lives in a cave on Suzukayama which is near Ise. Apparently it was quite a dangerous place for travelers.

What is interesting to note is how halfway through the dance the upper part of the costume is undone and drops to act like a flared skirt during the spinning. Thois last photo shows some of the acrobatics involved in the fight sequences.

Kanzui Matsuri 4

Its just about midnight at the small shrine in the mountain settlement of Kanzui not far from my own village. The annual matsuri got underway about 3 hours ago and the fourth dance starts, Michigaeshi, a not very common dance. A few more people arrive and now the audience just outnumbers the dancers and musicians.

Michigaeshi is a fairly typical 2 person dance, the hero and the demon, although the ending is most unusual.

The hero is the kami Takemikazuchi, a complex deity with connections to thunder, military might, and protection from earthquakes in his home area of Kashima, Ibaraki Prefecture. He is also enshrined at the Fujiwara's home shrine of Kasuga in Nara where he is considered their tutelary deity. The Fujiwara ruled over the kashima area so either they adopted him from there or possibly brought him there. According to the Kojiki version of the Kuniyuzuri myth he was one of the kami sent to subdue Izumo, though Izumo records make no mention of him.

The demon is unnamed, though follows the classic pattern of being a flesh-eating demon harassing local villagers.

This third video clip shows the battle between the two. If you cant be bothered to watch all the videos, this is the one to watch.

The hero of course triumphs, but, in an unuusal twist does not kill the demon. Instead he offers him the possibility of redemption if he travels to Takachiho in Kyushu, site of the "descent" of the Yamato ancestors from heaven, and take part in the rice harvest there.

When I first came to Iwami and started watching kagura I remember several people telling me that this was their favorite dance precisely because the demon is spared and not killed.

Kanzui matsuri 3

The third dance at Kanzui's annual all-night matsuri was the first theatrical piece of the evening, Yumi Hachiman. The dance is very common and most matsuris will perform it. the first part of the dance sees Hachiman introduce himself and strut his stuff....

Hachiman, also read as Yahata, was originally a kami from northern Kyushu but grew in influence and became associated with the legendary Emperor Ojin. Eventually adopted as the tutelary deity of samurai he is known as the god of war. Hachiman shrines are now very common, and by one method of calulating are the most common shrines in Japan.

The second part of the dance sees the demon make his entrance, strut his stuff, and then hachiman and he begin their combat.

There are two versions of the demons identity, the first simply has him as a demon from a foreign country plaguing the local villagers in north Kyushu. The second has him as a demon from the lower levels of Buddhist hell. As much of the buddhist content was purged from Iwami Kagura in the late 19th century, It would suggest that tghis version is older.

Not surprisingly, the demon is defeated by Hachiman using a bow and arrows, weapons especially associated with Ojin.

The young junior-highschool boy dancing hachiman did a good job. In larger kagura groups hachiman has an aide.

Kanzui Matsuri 2

For various reasons I only managed to get to one matsuri this Autumn, so I thought I would post on each dance in a little more detail.

The second dance is kamimukae, the welcoming of the gods.

kagura, like other "entertainments" at shrines is put on primarily for the kami, but fortunately the kami enjoy the same kinds of things as we mortals. After the space has been suitably purified the kami are welcomed. This is a shinji, a ceremonial rather than theatrical dance and is usually danced by 4 dancers, though I haver seen it danced with a single dancer.

Here at kanzui it was danced by only three, and like some other shrines Ive been to it was presented by the youngest members of the troupe, and is usually one of the first dances learnt by beginners.

The kids were very nervous, its possible that this was the first time they had performed this dance publicly, and the leader was seated just offstage to offer prompts. 2 of the dancers were girls. In recent years girls have started to dance kagura, though as yet I have not seen any dance any of the theatrical pieces. Girls playing the instruments is far more common.

Kanzui matsuri

October means matsuri, and matsuri means kagura!! usually by the middle of October I have been to half a dozen all-night matsuris, but this year because Ive been spending a lot of time on Shikoku, when I am back home I have too much work to catch up with so matsuris have had to take a back seat. But last saturday I did go up into the mountains to Kanzui....

kanzui is actually only a few kilometers from my village as the crow flies. there used to be a path connecting the two villages, but it has not been walked for many, many years. By road its about 10 kilometers.

There is no "centre" to kanzui, no shops, its really just a scattering of mountainside farms along a narrow mountain valley. My kind of place.

I arrived about 10pm, and the dancing began a little later. At a usual matsuri the first dance is always a purification dance to purify the dance area in preparation of the kami to descend. usually this dance is the Shioharae, a ceremonial dance done without masks. Here at Kanzui the first dance was Akumabarai, a different type of exorcism/purification dance most commonly performed in the Bitchu area of Western Okayama and eastern Hiroshima.

It is danced by Sarutahiko, and consists of three sections. In the first video he is dancing with Gohei (wand) and fan. The objects carried by the dancers in kagura are called torimono, and traditionally they are objects through which the kami "enter" the dancers.

In the second video he dances with an Onibo, a "demon stick" usually carried by demons.

In the third video he dances with two swords. Ive read that in Bitchu kagura the sword dancing predominates and has developed into a wider variety of styles.

During the Edo period akumabarai would sometimes be danced at the head of a wedding procession to purify the road ahead .

Kuromatsu Matsuri part 2

This is a continuation of an earlier post. The flotilla of boats carrying the mikoshi headed out to the island to pick up the goddess............

 

Nothing much will happen on land for a few hours and we were lucky enough to be invited in to a party......

Once the sun had gone down the lanterns on the beach were lit.....

Eventually the boats came back, and did three circuits of the torii on the little islet just off shore...

Three of the small boats in the conoy were lit in the shape of kanji.....

 

The musicians on the boat carrying the mikoshi and priest keeps up the incessant rhythmn and now the musicians on the beach join in.....

 

Once the boats make it back to land the mikoshi is carried to the beach. First the children carry their mikoshi out of the sacred matsuri area to the local shrine....

later the men start to carry the much heavier mikoshi....... but they never get off the beach..... they go forward, start to stagger from side to side, stop, back up, and try again...... this goes on till the early hours of the morning....

A True Tale of Typhoon Talas postscript

Sunday morning I woke late and the sun was already up. The sun!.... havent seen it for a few days. In many ways its as if the typhoon was just a dream.

The way to the next temple is straight up the mountain, but as the trail is very steep and there is a good chance the trail is running with water, washed out, or in other ways damaged, I decide to take the longer way, along the river around the mountain and go up the other side where there is a ropeway.

I head out of Oi across the bridge. The river is still swollen,brown and turbulent, but the debris in the trees show that it was 4 or 5 meters higher yesterday at its most flooded.

Im in the shade of the mountain which im grateful for as its already starting to warm up. The main road is on the other side of the river and this road is narrow with few habitations. Every few hundred meters water comes pouring off the mountainside and its like walking along a Japanese city street in the summer with the store doors open and air-conditioned air blasting out on to the street. There are rocks and stones scattered across the road, but no landslides.

About 6k later I get to the ropeway station that goes up 600 meters to Tairyuji. The ropeway car attendant tells me that yesterday the paddies in the village below were all underwater. The views from the ropeway are stunning and from the top I can even see back to the pagoda of Kakurinji. At the temple they tell me that trees along the trail down fell during the typhoon so the trail is dangerous so I decide to go back down by ropeway and head off the 14k to the next temple.

Walking through the village I was confronted with a strange site...... piles of rice by the sides of the road. The villagers had been up since first light sweeping the roads clean of all the rice that had been washed out of the paddies. This shrine was nice, with 1,000 year old trees. I chatted with one of the men cleaning up there and he gave me a bottle of tea..... so far I have found more osettai (gifts to pilgrims) at shrines than at the temples.

The main street of the village gave further evidence of the destruction caused yesterday by the flooding..... every house had been emptied and all the furniture, tatami etc stacked on the street to dry...

A few hours later, over a pass and on my way down along another river towards Byodoji, a rescre helicopter slowly hovers and passes up and down the river. teams of people are also walking the riverbanks peering down into the riverbanks. Typhoon Talas has claimed 100 people, either dead or missing.

But its not all doom and gloom. Life goes on. Not far from Byodoji I spy shrine banners flying and the sound of people. Matsuri!! Its a small Yasaka Shrine and the people insist is stay awhile and eat some local delicacies and drink some cold beers. Drinking beer and walking in the hot sun do not go well together, but im only a few minutes from the last temple I can visit on this segment of the pilgrimage, and it would be rude to refuse such an invitation, so I join them. They showed me some nice old sarutahiko masks as well......

Imbara Obon Matsuri

For Obon we went upriver a little ways to Imbara, part of Kawamoto Town, to check out their matsuri. There was kagura performed by the local kagura group who play in Hiroshima style. First dance was Jimmu, a 4 person dance depicting the final subjugation of the Yamato area by Jimmus invading force.

Next up was a performance of Zeni Daiko, a "dance" using 2 tubes decorated with tassles. Traditionally the tubes are bamboo and strung inside them are old coins, but nowadays plastic is not unusual. The tubes are waved, shaken, tapped on the floor, spun, and flipped from hand to hand in time to the music and provide a percussive accompaniment. The dance seems to be very popular in local villages.

Then some traditional dancing.....

The second kagura dance was one I had not seen before. Yamanba, based on a Noh story is popular with Hiroshima style groups, and I was pleased to see a mask that was new to me.

The "mountain hag" of the story transforms into her evil form...

... and a final battle puts paid to her and her accomplice....

Then there was the Bon Odori itself, and unusually it only lasted about 40 minutes..... other Bon Odoris Ive been to have gone on for hours. Also unusually a few of the villagers wore costumes for the dance....

The finale was a firework display..... not big by city standards, but nice that there were no barriers and huge crowds....

Kuromatsu Matsuri

A couple of weekends ago was one of my favorite matsuris at Kuromatsu, a fishing village on the coast not far from here.

I usually experience the matsuri from one of the flotilla of boats that take part, so this year for a change I thought I would see it from the land.

The matsuri takes place on the beach in front of the local shrine....

Around 5 in the evening the mikoshi is brought down to the beach......

It needs to be taken out to a small uninhabited island offshore where the honden of the shrine is located so that the goddess can be transferred into it and brought back to the beach for the matsuri.....

The boat used to carry the mikoshi, priests, and musicians, is a purpose built boat just used for this annual trip.

Once all are onboard the boat joins a flotilla of fishing boats that will escort it out to the island and back....

but first all the boats do three circuits of a small outcropping of rocks a few hundred meters offshore on which have been placed 2 small pine trees with a bamboo crosspiece to for a natural torii...

Then everyone heads out to the island to pick up the goddess....

The second part of this story can be found here...

Maidens planting rice

Here are some more photos of the Tauebayashi festival down in Kawahira last weekend.

Someone asked if in the olden days the saotome, planting maidens, used to be virgins, and I have been unable to find out for sure. I suspect it may have been the case sometimes, but rice-planting rituals varied so much from region to region that it was probably not a universal thing.

Was talking with a friend recently who had just finished planting his rice and he said that according to his father during the Taisho period (1920's) it was the women who planted the rice. The men did the preparation of the paddies. Since the war the rice planting has become mechanized and the men do it mostly, though I often see old ladies out in the paddies afterwards planting on the corners where the machines can get to.

I believe in premodern Japan the whole family would have been involved in the planting.

When I first came to Japan I was told several times that all the old women I saw who walked bent over at 90 degrees were that way because of a lifetime working in the paddies. Like many things I was told it turns out to be a myth. There are millions of old women bent over who have never been in a rice paddy in their lives. It is caused by calcium deficiency. Prewar japanese diet was very poor. High mortality and low longevity were the norm until the postwar period.

Anyway, the matsuri was enjoyable again this year, though I missed the young kids playing the music.

The men, of course, have things to do..... lots of supervising and encouraging the women :)