Obata's Trial

A Buried Jar That Tells the Coming Year

On the first Day of the Monkey in the eleventh lunar month, before the sky behind the mountains east of Shinshiro begins to pale, a small group of men walks out from Karato Shrine in the Obata district. They climb a narrow path into the forest above Enmei-ji Temple, where two small wayside shrines stand: one to the Mountain God, one to Atago. Between the shrines, in the dark earth, lies a clay jar buried twelve months earlier, filled at that time with freshly cooked red-bean rice. The ritual that begins here is called Otameshi — literally, "the test" — and it has been performed in this same patch of woodland for longer than anyone in the village can clearly remember.

The custom is locally classified as Yama no Kami Toshiura, a divination performed by the Mountain God to read the year ahead. It was registered by Shinshiro City as an Intangible Folk Cultural Property on April 1, 1958, one of the earliest such designations in the area.

How the Divination Is Read

The procession from Karato Shrine reaches the mountain altar as the eastern sky whitens. The parishioner representatives, the only people allowed onto this ground, lay simple woven bamboo mats in front of each small shrine and arrange the offerings: paper streamers known as gohei, sake poured into slender vessels cut from female bamboo, and a bowl of freshly cooked rice mixed with red beans.

The jar is then unearthed.

What the men find inside is the year's principal text. They examine the contents at close range, sifting and dividing as they go, and pour everything bit by bit into a stream that runs beside the altar. Four readings are taken from a single jar.

• How well the grains of rice and red beans have kept their original shape determines whether the coming harvest will be ranked upper, middle, or lower.
• The volume of rice remaining suggests the size of the coming harvest, generous or sparse.
• The amount of water that has collected inside the jar indicates the likelihood of flood or drought.
• Any foreign matter that has worked its way in — leaves, insects, debris — is read as a warning of disturbance, accident, or some break from the ordinary.

Once the contents of the old jar have been read and released into the water, a new portion of red-bean rice is cooked, sealed inside, and returned to the same hollow in the earth. The next year's divination has already begun.

Why It Has Endured

Year divinations of this kind, called toshiura, were once widespread across rural Japan. Villages used cooked food, fire, livestock, even crows as living gauges of the spirits' mood, and the results were taken seriously enough to shape how seeds were sown and how rice was stored. Most of these rituals fell away over the twentieth century as agriculture mechanized and the calendar of farm life lost its religious anchoring.

Obata's version is unusual for its mechanics. The buried jar functions as a slow instrument: it records twelve months of mountain weather (temperature, moisture, the activity of micro-organisms in the soil), and the men who open it are reading, without using that vocabulary, a kind of long-term environmental archive. Whether one chooses to call this divination or careful empirical observation, the practice has clearly transmitted real information about the land for generations.

The Mountain God area itself remains nyonin kinsei, closed to women, and that prohibition is still observed without exception. It is one of relatively few sites in Aichi Prefecture where the old taboo continues unbroken into the present.

Visiting the Area

The Otameshi rite is not a public event. It takes place before sunrise, on private mountain ground reached by a small path behind Enmei-ji Temple, and the participants enter the forest by lantern light. Travelers should not attempt to attend the ritual itself; the site is sacred and women in particular are prohibited from entering. Photographs of the ceremony are not generally permitted.

What can be seen at any time of year, however, is the landscape that produced this custom. The Obata neighborhood lies on the northern edge of central Shinshiro, in the foothills of the Okumikawa mountains. Karato Shrine sits at the foot of the hill where the ritual takes place. Enmei-ji Temple, the modern landmark used to find the area, stands at 35-1 Obata Onyu and can be visited freely during daylight hours.

From here the wider Okumikawa region opens up: Hōrai-ji Temple on Mount Hōraiji, the battlefield of Nagashino, and the Yuya Onsen hot-spring district along the Itsura River are all within a half-hour to an hour's drive. JR Mikawa-Tōgō Station, on the Iida Line, is the closest rail access and lies roughly two kilometers from the Obata district.