Shiramatsu Omachi (Grand Festival) Event

The Festival That Comes Only Once in Four Years

In the Shiramazu district at the southeastern tip of the Bōsō Peninsula, an entire village sets aside its ordinary work for three days every fourth summer. The occasion is the Ōmachi, the Grand Festival held for Hie Shrine, the tutelary shrine of Shiramazu. This is a small coastal settlement in Chikura, part of Minamibōsō City in Chiba Prefecture, with only around 230 households. Its residents have long earned a living half from farming the inland slopes and half from fishing the Pacific, and that double identity runs straight through the festival itself.

In 1992 the event was registered as a national Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property under the formal name "Shiramazu no Ōmachi (Daisai) Gyōji." It is not a single ceremony but a layered sequence: the shrine rites of Hie Shrine on one hand, and on the other a striking outdoor event called Ōnawatashi, in which a pair of towering banners is hauled across open ground with a heavy rope. Local tradition places the festival's origin in the year 901, the first year of the Engi era, though that date is handed down by word of mouth rather than by record.

Three Days, Three Names

The timing has shifted over the centuries. The Ōmachi once fell on the 14th, 15th, and 16th days of the sixth lunar month. After Japan adopted the solar calendar it moved to 23–25 July, and in practice recent festivals have sometimes been held on nearby late-July dates. Anyone planning a trip should confirm the schedule with local authorities well in advance.

Each of the three days carries its own name and character. The first, called Yomiya or Yoimatsuri, is the eve. The second, Nakabi or Honmachi, holds the weight of the festival. On this day the deity of Hie Shrine is brought down from the hillside to a temporary shrine by the shore in the procession known as O-hama-ori, and the Ōnawatashi follows in the afternoon. The third day, Atomachi, is when the portable shrine is borne back and the deity returns to its usual home.

Throughout, the festival moves as a procession. Groups of performers advance together and stop at set points to offer dances. It is this repeated pattern of progress and performance that holds the whole event together.

The Two Boys Treated as Gods

Few features of the Ōmachi draw as much attention as the role of the Nakadachi. These are two boys, chosen from among the parishioner children who have turned twelve. The selection is exacting. A candidate must be an eldest son, strong in his schoolwork, with parents and family in good health, and from a household that includes an elderly relative able to attend to his needs. Because of the ornaments they wear, the two are also called Nitten and Gatten, the sun and the moon.

For roughly fifty days before the festival, each boy lives under strict ritual abstinence. He eats only food prepared over a separate fire, a practice known as betsubi, kept apart from the ordinary cooking of the household. Every day before first light he walks barefoot to the beach, gathers sand still wet with seawater, and carries it to the shrine as an offering. This daily act, called Shogoritori, is still observed exactly as it has been for generations.

During the festival the Nakadachi stand at the center of the sasara dance. At the formal rites they sit beside the seat of the deity and receive the bows of the worshippers. For the length of the festival, the village treats two twelve-year-olds as living embodiments of the divine.

Why the Festival Was Designated

When the Agency for Cultural Affairs registered the Ōmachi in 1992, it pointed to several features rarely found together in one event. The purification customs surrounding the Nakadachi have been preserved with unusual rigor. The performing arts are divided into clearly defined groups by sex and by age, a structure that has survived where many communities have let it lapse. The great banners retain, in their shape, something of the old form of the yamahoko floats once common in Japanese festivals.

The Ōnawatashi also carries an element of toshiura, the divination of the year ahead, and it expresses with unusual clarity the contrast between land and sea, between farming and fishing, that defines life in Shiramazu. Taken together, these qualities show how a single community festival can preserve a layered record of older ritual practice. The sasara dance performed here had already been recognized in its own right: in 1971 it was selected, as the "Shiramazu Sasara Dance," among folk cultural properties for which documentary records should be made.

The Banners of Sun and Moon

The heart of the Ōnawatashi is a pair of giant banners, the ōnobori, one standing for the sun and one for the moon. Accounts of their height vary, placing them at somewhere around ten to twelve meters. They are raised on the approach to the shrine early on the first day, then moved to the Ōnawatashi ground early on the second. There their bases are packed firm with twenty straw rice-bales and braced on either side by two poles called kajibō.

What follows is physical and loud. Teams of young men take up a thick rope and pull the banners toward the karimiya, the temporary shrine, in a contest that is as much a trial of strength as an act of worship. The drama lies in more than the effort. In earlier times the village read the coming year from the pull itself, and the longer the banners could be drawn out, the better the year was expected to be. The way each banner finally toppled was watched closely too. Since the sun stood for the land and the moon for the sea, a Nitten banner falling first warned of drought, while a Gatten banner falling first foretold a wet year, or storms off the coast.

Around the Ōnawatashi unfold the festival's dedicated arts. The sasara odori runs to a full set of twelve pieces, performed by girls with the two Nakadachi at their center. Alongside it come performances called Tohiirai and Enyabō, and the sakadaru mandō, a lantern display built around sake casks. Each is the responsibility of a particular age group, so that taking part in the festival marks the stages of a Shiramazu life.

Planning a Visit

The single hardest fact for a traveler to absorb is that the Ōmachi happens only once every four years. Recent festivals were held in 2015 and 2019. The festival scheduled for 2023 was cancelled, the first time within local memory, because the village could no longer gather enough children to fill the performing roles, the Nakadachi among them. The strain that a falling birthrate places on a settlement of a few hundred households is visible here in a way that statistics rarely make plain. Anyone hoping to witness the next Ōmachi should check current plans with the Minamibōsō City Board of Education before traveling.

Shiramazu lies on the Chikura coast. The nearest rail access is Chikura Station on the JR Uchibō Line, from which the district is a short taxi or bus ride toward the shore. The festival grounds sit close to the sea, and late July on this coast is hot and bright, so sun protection and water are sensible companions for a day of watching.

Around Shiramazu

Even outside a festival year, the Chikura coast rewards a visit. The area is known across Chiba for its flower fields, which bloom through the cooler months and supply cut flowers nationwide; the coastal road through here is sometimes called the Bōsō Flower Line. A short distance away stands Takabe Shrine, unusual in Japan for being dedicated to the deity of cooking, where ceremonial knife rituals are performed during the year. The southern cape of the peninsula, marked by the Nojimazaki Lighthouse, offers wide Pacific views, and the surrounding waters supply the local restaurants with the fish and shellfish that have fed Shiramazu for centuries.