Doronko Festival

The Doronko Festival (also known as the Onda Festival or “Mud Festival”) is a traditional agricultural ritual held annually on the first Sunday of July in Seiyo City. With origins dating back to 1881 (Meiji 14), the festival is rooted in Shinto practices that express gratitude for the completion of rice planting and offer prayers for a bountiful harvest and good health. In 2000, it was designated an Intangible Folk Cultural Property of Ehime Prefecture.

The festival takes place in and around rice paddies, where participants deliberately cover themselves in mud as part of a series of symbolic performances. Following blessings at a local shrine, the event begins with shirokaki, during which large cattle — decorated with ritual paper streamers and banners — enter the fields and trample the soil in rhythm to traditional work songs. This act represents preparation of the paddies and invokes agricultural vitality.

Another key ritual, aze mame ue, features young men performing a stylised and humorous reenactment of planting ridge beans. Using bundles of straw, bamboo, and farming tools, they dramatise the agricultural process through exaggerated movements, slips, and mock scuffles, creating a lively scene that blends ritual with entertainment.

The ceremony continues with sanbai-oroshi, a Shinto rite in which priests offer prayers for agricultural abundance, followed by the presentation of offerings from the fields, forests, and sea. This is complemented by saotome odori, a hand dance performed by youths representing traditional rice planters. The festival concludes with otaue, during which children plant rice in the prepared fields, symbolising the continuation of farming traditions across generations.

Known for its vigorous energy, mud-covered performances, and ritualised humour, the Doronko Festival serves as a collective message of prayer and gratitude from the community to the gods. It reflects the close relationship between local life, agriculture, and seasonal cycles, preserving a distinctive cultural tradition unique to the Oku-Iyo region of Ehime.