My hometown's danjiri
The Many Faces of Festivals
I. What “Festival” Means in Town and in Village
Anyone raised in a village remembers the delight of festivals as a child. Unlike New Year’s or the Bon season, though, once you leave home you rarely chance upon other people’s local festivals, so you don’t end up talking about them much. Cities have shrine festivals too, of course, but far fewer people actually see them up close. As a result, many assume a festival must be something big, flashy, and crowded. That, in a nutshell, is the great divide between town and village.
By a twist of circumstance, many of you are now spending time in a quiet rural place, watching a whole run of festivals—large and small—unfold from spring into summer. Once you really get to know these, you begin to notice things townsfolk often miss.
Village festivals range from grand to humble; in some places there are dozens in a single year. Comparing them changes how you see festivals altogether. Travel around Japan and you discover something else: beneath the surface, festivals share a common core.
I remember the festivals of my home village from fifty, no—nearly sixty—years ago. Since then, I never managed to be back on the very day of the festival and assumed customs must have changed, or differed widely elsewhere. Yet when I actually asked around, I was surprised how many villages still celebrate in ways that look remarkably like my childhood. That, I think, is one of the quiet blessings of this great country.
It’s hard to feel this from hearsay alone. So let me sketch my own memories, and you can compare them with what you see and hear now—what matches, what doesn’t. My birthplace is far from here and little known; imitation is unlikely simply because of distance.
II. Two Shrines, Two Roles
My village had two shrines that hosted festivals. One was the 鎮守 chinju—the “guardian” shrine—located in the next hamlet. Eight or nine districts joined there once a year, holding a single, largest festival in late autumn, near the end of the harvest. The other was the 氏神 ujigami, often called 明神 Myojin, and all the remaining festivals in the year belonged to this local shrine. In rank, the guardian shrine was a district shrine 郷社 gosha, the village shrine a 村社 sonsha with a smaller precinct. Still, when we simply said “the shrine” or “the god,” we meant our ujigami.
Elsewhere the two roles are often combined in one shrine. In the neighboring hamlet, because the guardian shrine stands within its district, there is no separate ujigami; all yearly observances are held at that gosha. Such hamlets are called Miyamoto in parts of central Japan. In some larger villages, one and the same shrine is called both chinju and ujigami. In other places, households of the same lineage keep a private “clan deity” while the whole hamlet jointly worships an 産土 ubusuna (tutelary of the birthplace). Names vary, but you can assume each district has at least one shrine where everyone gathers to celebrate. Those “districts,” after all, are the remnants of older, single villages. Some districts now have two or more shrines—usually because small hamlets merged.
Why did people pool efforts for the guardian shrine? Likely to make the “great festival” truly great—grander and brighter. The festival day often fell around the Ninth Month by the old lunar calendar (mid-autumn). For farmers, autumn is the season of ease. Barring a bad year, preparations start early: households cure mackerel for pressed sushi, the scent of sweet sake drifts through lanes, children eat themselves happily full, and tall banners snap in the autumn wind. On the day, each hamlet sends out its float; some smaller villages pull だんじり danjiri carts. When the 神輿 mikoshi—the portable shrine—sets out to tour the settlements, even the elderly step outside; little ones will follow the drums the whole day.
III. The Great Day and the Rest
On the great festival day, the entire village—every household—was at festival. Daughters married out and sons in service came home; kin were invited; tipsy uncles wandered in and out. The “host house” that managed the festival was busiest: those on duty accompanied the mikoshi and ran errands to the guardian shrine. Women often stayed back for household work, so fewer of them made the rounds. Meanwhile, elders with no assigned role would still visit the ujigami as usual, offering lights and food. Children, captivated by the floats, rarely came by, so the village shrine felt a touch quiet.
There was a clear difference between the guardian shrine’s once-a-year great festival and the other observances at the ujigami. Even where one shrine served both roles, only the great festival featured the divine procession 御幸 miyuki: the splendid tour of the mikoshi, decked in gold and vivid colors. In some big Tokyo shrines the procession loops back to the main hall, but more commonly the mikoshi is welcomed at an 御旅所 otabisho—a temporary “travel lodge” for the deity—where it rests for a day or a night and rites are held. The otabisho site is fixed, often 500–1,100 meters from the main shrine, sometimes farther. Some places, like Miwa in Yamato, set a temporary hall right inside the grounds; our guardian shrine did the same.
In Kyushu, people still call the procession the deity’s “descent” 御降り/御下り okudari. In older thinking, the god came down from a higher realm each time a festival was held. Later, people came to feel the deity abides continually in the shrine building, and festival forms diverged into “great” and “small.” Even then, when rites were held within the main hall, the core idea remained: the deity descends and is present.
Divine descent is not seen with the eye; some festivals even have the god arrive in the deep of night. Turning that into a daytime pageant through sunlit streets is a later development. To suit it, people invented “moving stages” to enliven the route.
IV. Music, Dance, and Pageantry
Music and dance have accompanied festivals since antiquity. For them, people might lay out mats and hang curtains, build a permanent stage beside the hall, or purify a parishioner’s house for temporary use. The place depends on where the deity is formally welcomed that day. Mounting the stage on poles to be borne, or on wheels to be drawn, is newer—meant to brighten the daytime procession—and so is having parishioners perform on it. In that sense, the older form is the small, stationary rite where the community quietly welcomes the deity.
In Kyoto they called such brilliant processions 風流 furyu—pageantry. The style was born of Kyoto’s culture and imitated in the provinces, which could rarely match the capital’s polish. Eager to keep up, country folk poured energy into their great festivals, yet they never treated the smaller observances lightly. Those were intimate village affairs—well known to locals but easy for visitors to miss.
The deity’s “vehicle” was once very simple: a single wand with paper streamers 御幣 gohei, or a clean sacred bough. The belief that the god alights upon it is, quite simply, faith—and many still hold it. To feel that the deity has just arrived in the festival yard requires no special sound or signal. What mattered was preparation: the confidence that time-honored procedures—物忌 monoimi (“things-to-avoid,” ritual abstinence)—had been observed without lapse. With that, people could rest assured the deity would come. Later, some borrowed the Buddhist term 精進 shojin (“purification” or “abstinence”), but in festival practice it chiefly meant bodily cleanliness; eating fish or fowl was fine. The key was never to defile the cooking fire.
V. Purity, “Keeping Away,” and Keeping Company with the Gods
Few pantheons cherish purity and shun defilement as strongly as Japan’s. The idea that a “fire can be defiled” may sound foreign, but people avoided not only contact with blood or mourning themselves; even sharing a hearth with someone who had been in contact with such impurity was thought to distance one from the divine. Thus, in the days before a festival, households closed their doors to visitors and kept a strict monoimi. Crowds, however, invite mishaps. So those who had to work the festival withdrew for several days to a separate place to live in restraint. That place was called the 精進屋 shojin-ya or “vigil lodge” 御籠り所 okomori-dokoro. Sometimes a temporary hut was built; sometimes a private home was purified; some shrines maintained an office or steward’s quarters for it. Nowadays many villages use the worship hall itself. As work lives grew busier, the vigil grew shorter, but in many places young men still bring bedding and keep watch from the night before. Elders and women come the morning of the festival; this is called 日籠り higomori (“day-vigil”), a reminder that the vigil was originally overnight.
People bring neat, clean food and sacred sake, offer the first portion to the deity, then partake themselves and exchange dishes with their neighbors. It is a shared meal of gods and people—singularly joyful and unforgettable, not only for us as boys and girls but for the grown-ups too.
All the “small” shrine days were, at heart, such okomori days—when tiered lunch boxes were opened and adults cheerfully traded cups of sake. Especially delightful was late spring: wisteria and azaleas in the hills; green barley, rapeseed, and rosy clover in the fields; skylarks high overhead. Farmers held a “rice-planting vigil” before they started work, and cherished it most. There were also ad-hoc observances: a “rain vigil” (sometimes nicknamed a “little New Year of moisture”) when timely showers came, or an “insect festival” if pests threatened—each much the same in how the vigil was kept.
“Year-vigil” meant spending New Year’s Eve at the shrine, but winter is cold, so today many simply go before dawn. Around the winter solstice there used to be a “Fire-Lighting” rite: a great bonfire in the shrine’s yard, coaxing spring to come a little sooner. As the flames rose, village children arrived, stripped to wrestle in the firelight, and received treats whether they won or lost.
Beyond these were the seasonal 節供 sekku festivals and the 1st and 15th of each month—perhaps not “fixed” shrine days, yet times when hearts reset, people arrived at similar hours, lamps were lit, and offerings set out. In the Kanto region, people also visited on the 28th, calling these observances 御三日 Osanjitsu. More recently, some gather on the 8th to talk about affairs of the country in the worship hall—conversation that, of itself, becomes a prayer.
Private petitions exist too, but even then people do not go it alone. If someone falls gravely ill, the whole household—often with close friends—goes together to pray; the solitary “hundred visits” are not a country habit. When a child is born, there is a rite called “entering the parish”—氏子入り ujiko-iri. As soon as the mother’s confinement is ritually over, the baby is carried to the shrine; the child’s name is spoken clearly before the deity, and sometimes the infant is laid briefly on the mat to cry under divine eyes. It looks like a family-only observance, but the family also steams red rice, offers a portion on camellia leaves to the shrine, and shares the rest with the village children—an instant way to make new friends. Word spreads fast; the worship hall fills with children that day too.
Apart from one’s own home, the shrine hall is a child’s most familiar place. From about the thirtieth day after birth until their “coming-out” to the wider world, children play there whenever they can. Our Myōjin shrine had a massive bayberry tree—three arm-spans around. Nearly sixty years since I left, I’m told children still gather beneath it, plucking the fruit before it’s even fully ripe—just as I did. The bond between village children and the shrine endures, much as it always has.
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