Honkai Lion Dance Banraku

Honkai Shishimai Bangaku: A Lion Dance from the Foothills of Mt. Chokai

A dancer raises the lion's head, tilts it forward, and snaps its carved wooden jaws shut. The clack carries across the room, pauses, then comes again. In thirteen hamlets of Chokaimachi, in the Akita Prefecture city of Yurihonjo, this sound has marked the opening and closing of the year for close to four centuries. The performance is called Honkai Shishimai Bangaku, and it belongs to a living calendar of shrine festivals, harvest rites, and household blessings rather than to a stage.

Each hamlet keeps its own version. There is no single troupe and no central script. What binds the thirteen communities is a shared origin, a shared body of dances, and a lion whose jaw-clacking is unusually fierce.

A Mountain Religion and a Wandering Ascetic

Chokaimachi sits about 30 kilometers inland from the Sea of Japan, on the northeastern slopes of Mt. Chokai. The active volcano rises on the border between Akita and Yamagata, and people once knew it as Dewa Fuji, the Mt. Fuji of the old Dewa Province. Sailors used its profile as a navigation mark, and its record of repeated eruptions gave it a reputation as a place of power. Mountain worship centered on it for centuries.

Local tradition credits the lion dance to a religious figure remembered as Honkai gyonin, or Honkaibo. He is said to have been a shugen ascetic connected to the Sanbo-in cloister of Daigo-ji temple in Kyoto, skilled in the performing arts, who reached the foot of Mt. Chokai during the Kan'ei era (1624 to 1644) and taught the dances directly to the villages. The name Honkai, attached to the tradition ever since, comes from him. What he passed on is a form of yamabushi kagura, the ritual dance of mountain ascetics.

Whether today's dances match what Honkai taught cannot be proven. Two lion heads, however, carry carved dates, one from 1658 and another from 1702, and curtains, masks, and dance-text books bearing a 1747 inscription also survive. The objects confirm that lion dancing was long established here.

Why the Dance Was Designated

In March 2011, Honkai Shishimai Bangaku was designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property by the national government. The designation rests on two grounds: the tradition shows how a performing art changed over time, and it carries strong regional character.

"Bangaku" is the name used across northern Akita and Yamagata for the ritual dances of yamabushi kagura. A full bangaku program once followed a fixed order of numbers: twelve on the "front" and twelve on the "back," doubled into a notional forty-eight. The word bangaku is thought to come from this numbered sequence.

What sets the Honkai tradition apart is the weight it places on the lion. The lion dance always comes first, before any other number, and it is treated as the heart of the whole performance. Compared with lion dances tied to other mountain cults, the movements here are more forceful, and the jaw-clacking is repeated far more often. Three motions form its base: the clapping of the upper and lower jaws, a sharp side-to-side shaking of the head, and a lifting of the head followed by a downward tilt.

The lion was believed to hold genuine power. Communities trusted it to ward off fire and to quiet epidemics, and for that reason it was sometimes sent out alone, dancing door to door without the rest of the program. Some lion heads were even given divine names and handed down with particular care.

The Dancing Year

Each hamlet's troupe begins its year in January with a rite called maku-biraki, the opening of the curtain, and ends it between September and December with maku-osame, the closing of the curtain. For both, members of the ko, the community association that maintains the dance, gather at a house, pay their respects to the lion, and dance. The numbers performed on these days are fixed, and the mood leans closer to ritual than to entertainment.

Between those bookends the lion appears at shrine festivals, which fall on a different date in each hamlet. Koya holds its festival at Hakusan Shrine on April 20, Sagenabe at Dainichigu on April 28, Kami-momoyake at Ontake Shrine on May 18, and Naka-hitane at Shinmeisha on the sixteenth day of the sixth lunar month. In July, some hamlets carry the lion from settlement to settlement for mushi-oi, a rite to drive away crop pests, dancing at shrines along the way before ending at a riverbank.

At Bon in August, the lion travels house to house as the o-harai or bon lion. After a dance in the main room, the performer shoulders the body cloth, takes up the head, and gently bites the heads and shoulders of the seated family, a blessing for health and household safety. When a new house is built, the lion performs a fire-prevention rite, circling and biting a pillar wrapped in straw matting. From late August into mid-September, each community holds its harvest festival, the saku-matsuri.

Beyond the Lion: The Wider Repertoire

The lion is the center, but it is not the whole. The other dances fall into several types: ceremonial pieces such as Okina and Sanbaso, close to the openings of Noh theater; god dances such as Yama-no-kami, the mountain deity, and Tsurugi-no-mai, the sword dance; warrior dances drawn from medieval war tales, including Soga, Kumagai, and Yashima; women's dances such as Kanemaki and Hashihiki; and comic interludes such as Bangaku-taro. Records of dance texts held by each ko suggest that troupes once knew well over twenty numbers apiece.

How many survive today is counted differently by different sources. The national cultural property database records something over twenty-five numbers across all the groups, with the Shimo-hitane ko holding the most at sixteen. Other accounts, citing the old manuscript Honkai-ryu Shishimai Hiden Daiji, put the historical total at forty-eight and the number still danced at around thirty. Either way, only a portion of the original repertoire remains.

One object ties the whole performance together: the curtain. In a farmhouse it is hung between two rooms, dividing the audience from the preparation area and acting as a kind of boundary. Dancers enter only through the center of the curtain, never from the side. Most curtains are cotton, though older ones woven from hemp or ramie survive, dyed with indigo or plant dyes in local patterns. The dance is so identified with this cloth that its first day of the year is called the opening of the curtain and its last the closing.

Seeing the Dance

Because the dances belong to each hamlet's own festival calendar, catching a performance in its original setting takes planning. The most reliable place to see it is the Mai-re folk performing arts hall in Yurihonjo, which keeps masks and lion heads from the tradition on display and stages performances on the third Sunday of most months, drawing on the Honkai troupes and on bangaku from neighboring areas.

Once a year, in early August, the Chokai Shishi Festival brings the active ko together at an open-air stage at the Chokai Health Plaza. Bonfires light the ground as the troupes dance in turn. For anyone hoping to see several hamlets' versions in a single evening, this is the occasion.

Mai-re stands in the Fushimi district of Chokaimachi. From outside Akita, the usual route runs by rail to Ugo-Honjo Station, then along the Yuri Kogen Railway's Chokai Sanroku Line to Yashima Station, with a short bus or taxi ride from there. By car, the hall is about 30 kilometers from the Honjo interchange by way of national routes 107 and 108, roughly 40 minutes. Festival dates and the monthly schedule shift from year to year, so confirming with the hall or the Chokai education office before traveling is wise.