Bull Horn Fighting Customs of the Nanyo Region

Bull Sumo in the Hills of Southern Ehime

At noon on January 2, while much of Japan is still settling into the new year, a domed arena on a hill above Uwajima fills with the dull crack of horn meeting horn. Two bulls, each weighing more than a ton, lean into each other across a ring twenty meters wide. There is no matador and no spear. The bout ends when one animal turns and bolts, and the winner is simply the one that held its ground.

This is ushi no tsunotsuki, the bull sumo handed down across the Nanyo, the southern districts of Ehime Prefecture on Shikoku. Locally the practice is called tsukiai or tsukiyai, and the old village rings went by the name daba. In 1995 the Agency for Cultural Affairs recorded the whole tradition, from the breeding of the animals to the techniques of the bouts, as a Selected Intangible Folk Cultural Property.

A Contest Between Animals, Not Against Them

Visitors who picture the bullfighting of Spain or Portugal should set those images aside. Japanese togyu sets one bull against another, and the aim is dominance rather than death. The losing bull is the one that breaks away and flees. The animals are not killed in the ring, and a prized fighter that takes a heavy defeat is usually rested for months before it competes again.

The bouts run without a time limit and without nose ropes. Handlers called seko circle the pair, shouting encouragement and reading the moment, but the bulls fight on instinct. In Uwajima the moves a bull can make are sorted into roughly ten named techniques, and like wrestlers the animals carry ranks that climb from the lower divisions to yokozuna. A bull faces only opponents of its own grade, so a match is a meeting of equals rather than a foregone conclusion.

How Far Back It Runs

No record fixes the beginning with certainty, and two stories compete. One traces the custom to the Kamakura period, when farmers raising draft cattle are said to have noticed their animals locking horns on their own and turned the habit into amusement. The other is more specific. In the late seventeenth century, fishermen from Fukuura rescued the crew of a Dutch ship adrift in the Uwa Sea, and the two cattle given to them in thanks happened to fight, supposedly setting the pattern.

What the documents confirm comes later. By the Kyowa era, around 1801 to 1804, domain-period papers describe proper bouts staged inside built rings. A magistrate's letter from 1856 grumbles that the matches had grown so frequent that cattle prices were climbing, a sign that the spectacle had taken firm hold. Through the Meiji and Taisho periods officials banned or restricted it more than once, yet popular enthusiasm carried it to a peak in the late Taisho and early Showa years, when nearly every valley around Uwajima kept its own ring of simple bamboo fencing.

Why It Was Recorded

The 1995 selection was an act of preservation under pressure. As farms mechanized and the countryside thinned out, working cattle all but vanished from the hills, and with them went the breeding knowledge, the local rules, and the particular ways each district had staged its bouts. The Agency for Cultural Affairs judged that this body of custom showed a typical, foundational feature of ordinary Japanese life, and that it needed documenting before the chain of memory broke. Ehime's Board of Education completed a full survey report in 2001.

The designation names no single guardian group and no fixed site. It protects a way of doing things spread across a region, which is why the tradition reads less like a monument and more like a set of skills kept alive by the people who still raise and handle the bulls.

Where to See It Today

The surviving heart of the custom is the Uwajima Municipal Bullfighting Arena, built in 1975 on a low hill a few minutes from JR Uwajima Station. The dome shelters a packed-earth ring twenty meters across, ringed by stepped seating for around 1,600 spectators. Older venues survive only in place names. The Warei ring behind Warei Shrine, once the most important in the city, lent its name to the summer tournament that still runs today.

Four regular tournaments fill the year. The New Year meeting falls on January 2, the May meeting on May 3, the Warei Grand Festival meeting on July 23, and the autumn meeting on the fourth Sunday of October. Gates open at 10 a.m. and the bouts begin at noon, lasting about two and a half hours. On days without a tournament the arena stays open for a look inside, with a video booth and a VR program that recreate the noise and scale of a live match, and private bouts can be arranged in advance.

Uwajima rewards a longer stay. The compact keep of Uwajima Castle, one of only twelve original donjons left in Japan, stands a short walk from the center, and the Kisaiya Hiroba roadside market is a good place to try local citrus and jakoten fish cakes between events.