Suiho Shibauma Festival

A Grass Horse Floated Down a River in Ichinomiya

Every September, in the Asano-Mizunori district of Ichinomiya in Aichi Prefecture, men of the neighborhood spend a morning twisting cut cogon grass into the shape of a horse. The animal they build is taller than a child and weighs as much as a person once its body is packed with grass. Its eyes are eggplants studded with ground-cherry fruit and red chili peppers; an ear of corn and two more eggplants form its other features. By early afternoon the figure is finished, and the children of Hakusan Shrine take hold of ropes tied to it and pull it through the streets. The procession ends at the edge of town, where the horse is sent into the water and allowed to drift away.

This is the Shibauma Matsuri, the Grass Horse Festival of Mizunori. It is held to ask for freedom from illness and protection from misfortune, and the central act, releasing a hand-built horse into a river, has been repeated here for generations. In 1980 the national government selected it as an intangible folk cultural property worthy of documentation, and in 1984 Aichi Prefecture designated it in its own right.

A Festival Born from the Mongol Invasions

Local accounts trace the festival to the second Mongol invasion of 1281, known in Japanese as the Kōan campaign. To meet the invading fleet that struck northern Kyushu, fighters and warhorses were levied from across the country, and the horses raised in this part of Owari Province are remembered as having served with distinction. When a sudden storm scattered and sank much of the Mongol fleet, people read the deliverance as the work of the gods. The villagers are said to have fashioned a sacred horse from grass to honor the warhorses and to welcome home the deities who had raised the saving wind. That act, by tradition, became the first Shibauma Matsuri.

How much of this is history and how much is legend is impossible to settle, and the preservation society presents the origin story plainly as something handed down. What is clear is that the festival belongs to a wider family of horse-offering customs in Aichi, where decorated horses have long been dedicated to shrines, and that its particular form, a horse of grass given to the river, is unusual enough to have drawn the attention of folklorists.

Why It Is Protected

The festival carries two layers of official recognition. At the national level it falls under a category often shortened to "selected" intangible folk cultural property: the Agency for Cultural Affairs identified it, on 12 December 1980, as a custom for which a documentary record should be made, and a film record was produced by the Aichi prefectural board of education in 1994. At the prefectural level, Aichi designated the festival as an intangible folk cultural property on 30 March 1984.

Both decisions point to the same value. The Shibauma Matsuri preserves a complete ritual cycle that uses only materials gathered from the land around the shrine, and it assigns clear roles to children of different ages, passing the practice down by participation rather than instruction. The reliance on cogon grass, wisteria vine, oak, and garden vegetables, and the final act of dissolving the horse in flowing water, make it a living example of an agrarian community marking the turn of the seasons through what its own fields and groves could provide.

How the Horse Is Built

Preparation begins well before the festival day. The grass and vine needed for the horse are cut in advance and sunk in water so they will not dry out and grow brittle. On the morning itself, the materials are gathered at the shrine, purified, and blessed in a short rite asking that the day pass without incident. Direction falls to a rotating group of organizers known as the nenban, who carry responsibility for the year.

The work is methodical. Lengths of cogon grass are matched and bundled, then bound with rope and split wisteria vine. Three plaited strands of grass become the upper jaw, the lower jaw, and the tongue; layered together they form the head, and the body grows outward from there. Four stout sticks of oak make the legs. A single horse swallows roughly seventy to eighty kilograms of grass. The binding is done entirely with materials from nature, the vine torn into strips for cord, and the twists worked into the face, called yori, are turned about seven times from the tip. The eyes and other features go on last, and the figure is usually complete a little after midday. In the late twentieth century the makers began adding a tail, formed from finer grasses or millet.

Ask why cogon grass in particular, and the answer reaches back to ordinary farm life. Grass of this kind once grew abundantly in the district and was cut for horse fodder, so building the festival animal from it would have felt natural to people who fed real horses the same way.

The Children's Procession

The procession is the part of the day that belongs to children, and the work is divided by age. The youngest, in the first to third grades of elementary school, walk behind the horse holding a rope. Fourth and fifth graders take the rope at the front and pull. The two sixth graders have the hardest task: they support the middle of the body with one hand the whole way, keeping the wisteria binding from snapping until the horse reaches the water.

Older residents describe a livelier scene in earlier decades, before roads were paved and before a cart was used to ease the load. Loose grass would scatter across the route, the children were many enough to fill the road, and traffic simply waited. The destination has always been the same: the stream once called the Mizunori River, now part of the Shin-Hannya irrigation channel on the east side of town, where the horse is released and the prayers for health are carried off with it.

Seeing the Festival Today

The Shibauma Matsuri is centered on Hakusan Shrine in the Asano-Mizunori district. For most of its recorded history it fell on hassaku, the first day of the eighth lunar month, but in 2018 the preservation society moved it to the first Saturday of September so that more families could take part. The afternoon includes a Shinto rite at the shrine before the horse sets out, with the procession reaching the waterway later in the day.

This is a community event rather than a ticketed attraction, so visitors should watch quietly from the roadside and follow any guidance from the organizers. Because exact times and the route can shift from year to year, it is worth confirming the current schedule with the Ichinomiya city authorities before traveling. The shrine sits within easy reach of central Ichinomiya, which makes the festival straightforward to combine with the city's other sights.

Around Ichinomiya

Ichinomiya takes its name from Masumida Shrine, the first-ranked shrine of the old Owari Province and a spacious, much-visited sanctuary near the main railway stations. Its grounds are busiest during the Tanabata festival in summer, when the streets around it fill with stalls, but on a quiet day the precinct with its carp pond is a calm place to walk. Toward the south of the city, the Ichinomiya City Museum sits beside the temple grounds of Myōkō-ji and offers a well-arranged introduction to the area's history, from archaeology to the textile trade that long sustained the region. The two make a natural pairing for anyone spending a full day in the city after watching the morning's horse take shape.