Namahage Sedo Festival

The Namahage Sedo Festival is a winter festival at Shinzan Shrine on the Oga Peninsula. It joins two traditions: the Saitosai (柴灯祭), a fire rite held at the shrine every 3 January for more than 900 years, and Namahage, the masked visitors who call at Oga homes on New Year's Eve. A large bonfire, the sedo fire, burns in the shrine grounds through the evening.

History

The festival began in 1964 as a snow festival meant to bring winter visitors to the Oga hot spring villages, with the shrine's Saitosai taken as its model on the advice of a folklorist. The first three editions were held at Hoshitsuji Shrine in Kitaura Yumoto. As the crowds outgrew it, the festival moved to Shinzan Shrine. It has never been cancelled: in 1974, when heavy snow could not be cleared at Shinzan, it went back to Hoshitsuji Shrine for the year.

Namahage

On New Year's Eve, young men in about 85 neighbourhoods of Oga put on masks and kede (ケデ), straw costumes, and go from house to house as Namahage. They stride through each home shouting for crying children and asking whether the young wife of the house gets up early. For the people of Oga, Namahage are visiting deities who come at the turn of the year to scold laziness and to bring good health, good harvests and the bounty of the mountains and the sea. Each household receives them with food and sake, following old custom.

The tradition was designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property in 1978 as Oga no Namahage (男鹿のナマハゲ), and was added to UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2018.

What happens

The evening opens at the entrance to the grounds with Yu no Mai (湯の舞), a purification kagura particular to the Oga area, and Chinkamasai (鎮釜祭), an old hot-water rite. A priest stirs a boiling cauldron with a straw broom while reciting prayers, a rite believed to calm the waves of the sea. At the stone steps of the approach, young men are then purified by the priests and receive masks into which the spirit has been placed. In this Namahage Nyukon (なまはげ入魂) they become Namahage and go back up into the mountain.

In the kagura hall, a New Year's Eve house visit is acted out, and Namahage Daiko combines Namahage with taiko drumming. The drumming was first tried in the Oga hot spring villages in the 1970s and given its present form by a local preservation group in the 1980s. In front of the bonfire, dancers perform Namahage Odori, created in 1961 by the Akita-born modern dancer Ishii Baku with music by his son, the composer Ishii Kan.

The climax comes when Namahage carrying torches appear out of the dark at the top of the snowy mountain, walk down the approach and move through the crowd. In the Kenpei (献餅) that follows, a priest offers the Namahage, as messengers of the gods, goma mochi: large rice cakes baked over the sedo fire. The divine power in the rice cakes makes them hard for the Namahage to touch, but in the end they take them and return to the gods. The rice cakes are cut and handed out to spectators in front of the kagura hall, and are believed to protect against fire. Namahage from different districts of Oga, each with their own masks and costumes, then burst into the grounds.