Nishiura Dengaku

An all-night ritual in a midwinter mountain valley

On the eighteenth night of the old lunar first month, when the moon clears the ridgeline above a remote valley in northern Shizuoka, lamplight gathers around a small wooden hall and stays lit until dawn. This is Nishiure no Dengaku, a sacred performance held in the precincts of the Kannon-do at Shono, a hamlet in the Nishiure district of Misakubo, now part of Tenryu Ward in the city of Hamamatsu. From moonrise to sunrise, roughly twenty hereditary performers called nōshū dance, mime, and chant through the cold of the mountain night, working through some forty numbered pieces in front of a torch-lit stage set up in the temple garden.

Local people long called it simply omatsuri, the festival, or Kinone matsuri, the festival of the tree roots. The name Nishiure no Dengaku belongs to the cultural-property registers. By any name the event is first a prayer: for a good harvest, for freedom from illness, for the continuation of the valley's families, and for protection against the dangers of water and fire.

A festival said to reach back thirteen centuries

By local tradition the rite began in the year 719, when the wandering monk Gyōki is said to have come to Nishiure, carved an image of Shō Kannon along with several masks, and started the dengaku that summer. The Buddhist image is still kept as the principal object of worship in the hall, and a set of masks, twenty-four of them today, is still worn in the dance. That founding account is better read as legend than as record. The oldest surviving document connected to the festival dates only to 1681, but the structure of the performance, together with comparisons to related arts in neighbouring districts, leads specialists to trace its core back at least to the Muromachi period.

The valley lies at the northern edge of Shizuoka, near where the prefecture meets Aichi and Nagano. This corner of the mountains, where the old provinces of Mikawa, Tōtōmi, and Shinano come together, holds an unusual concentration of dengaku-related performance. The link runs deep enough that the Yukimatsuri of nearby Niino, just over the border in Nagano, carries a tale of someone who once tried to carry off a mask from Nishiure.

Folklorists noticed the place early. Orikuchi Shinobu wrote of Okuryoke in his poetry, and a stone carved with one of his verses stands within the temple grounds, while Yanagita Kunio counted the festival among the rites worth recording. Official recognition followed. In 1970 the dengaku was selected for national documentation, and on 4 May 1976 it was designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property.

Why the dance matters to the history of Japanese performance

What the designation honours is less the spectacle than the archive held inside it. The night is organised in stages. After preparatory rites with names such as niwa-sadame and chinju-sai, and the ceremony of welcoming the deities Tengu and Tenpaku, the main performance unfolds: a sequence called jinō of thirty-three pieces, then hanenō, recorded in the official designation as thirteen numbers though often counted today as twelve, closing with the lion dance and shizume, the quieting rite that sends the gods home.

Three features give the dance its particular standing. The jinō preserves takaashi, an old dengaku feat in which a performer balances and hops on a single tall stilt, the sort of acrobatic skill for which travelling dengaku troupes were famous in medieval times. It also keeps a body of taasobi, agricultural mime that acts out the farming year through pieces like tauchi, the breaking of the field, and tanemaki, the sowing of seed. And it retains modoki, a device by which a piece is performed once in formal style and then repeated in a comic, imitative version. Each of these had largely disappeared from other traditions, which is why folklorists treat Nishiure as a living reference for how medieval dengaku actually worked.

The nōshū and the rules they keep

The performance is carried by the men of the valley. At its centre stands the bettō, the festival head who also tends the Kannon-do; the role has belonged to the Takagi family, whose present head took it up in 2011. Around him the nōshū are drawn from three groupings of hamlets, upper, middle, and lower, each led by a nōtō, or dance head. Two boys between roughly eight and thirteen, called tayogami, take part as well.

Roles are hereditary. For generations a given family danced a given number, passed from father to eldest son, the parts of the jinō fixed by household while the hanenō stayed open. The system held for more than two hundred years from the early eighteenth century, until depopulation through the mid-twentieth century made strict inheritance impossible. Since 1976 the nōshū have shared the parts among themselves, and younger sons now dance numbers once reserved for the eldest. The performers still keep old precepts of purification before the rite, avoiding meat and staying apart from death.

What a visitor sees, and what to know before going

The setting does much of the work. The garden in front of the hall is small, and once fifty onlookers ring the stage it is full. Masks surface and recede in firelight, the cold sharpens every sound, and the rite continues hour after hour with no concession to an audience clock. Anyone who comes should plan to stay late and dress for a mountain night in deep winter, since the dancing runs until the sun returns.

Getting there takes some effort, which is part of the experience. The nearest station is Misakubo on the JR Iida Line, an unmanned stop served by local trains and the Inaji limited express; from Toyohashi the limited express takes about an hour and a half. From the station it is a short drive north and then up a winding road to the steps that climb to the hall. By car, the trip from the Hamamatsu-Hamakita interchange on the Shin-Tōmei Expressway to central Misakubo takes a little over an hour.

The festival follows the old lunar calendar, so the date shifts from year to year and in recent seasons has tended to fall in mid-February. It is worth checking the schedule ahead of time, since the performance has occasionally been reduced to rituals only. The Misakubo folk museum in Hamamatsu keeps displays on the dengaku for anyone who wants background, or who arrives outside the festival season.