Wooden Early Music Mask

Wooden Old Gakumen Masks at Nagataki Hakusan Shrine

Twenty-seven carved wooden masks survive at Nagataki Hakusan Shrine in the upper Nagara River valley, ranging in date from the late Kamakura period through the late Edo period. They are designated collectively as an Important Cultural Property under the name Mokuzō Kogakumen, literally "wooden old gaku-masks." The first designation came on 27 June 2000 (Heisei 12), with an additional designation on 21 August 2014 expanding the group. No other shrine along the historical Hakusan pilgrimage routes preserves a comparable holding, either in number or in range of types.

The masks belong to the wider story of Hakusan worship. Mount Hakusan, the 2,702-metre volcano rising on the border of present-day Gifu, Ishikawa and Fukui prefectures, was venerated from at least the Nara period as a sacred peak. Three pilgrimage gateways, the so-called Sanbaba, fed climbers onto its slopes: Kaga to the north, Echizen to the west, and Mino, whose entry was here at Nagataki. Pilgrims, performers, and sponsors offered masks in fulfillment of vows, and successive abbots and lay donors continued the practice over centuries. The result is a single shrine collection that mirrors the entire arc of medieval and early modern Japanese masked performance.

From Mountain Cult to Sarugaku Stage

Nagataki Hakusan Shrine was, until the Meiji separation of Shinto and Buddhism in 1868, the Tendai temple Hakusan Chūgū Nagataki-ji. Tradition attributes its founding in 717 to the ascetic Taichō, the figure credited with opening Hakusan to religious practice. By the Kamakura and Muromachi periods the complex had grown into what local records describe as "six valleys, six cloister-temples, three hundred and sixty sub-temples," with landholdings reaching some 13,000 koku. Mountain ascetics here were expected to acquire performance skills as part of their discipline, and the broad networks of yamabushi carried sarugaku, dengaku, and ritual dance into Nagataki along with pilgrims.

This is why the mask collection cuts so unusually wide. Several pieces predate the formal codification of Noh by Kan'ami and Zeami in the fourteenth century. They preserve, in wood, a vocabulary of ritual personae from shushōe rites, mountain-ascetic rituals, and pre-Noh sarugaku that elsewhere is known mostly from texts and paintings.

What the 27 Masks Show

The set encompasses several families of mask carving. There are Okina-type masks of the white-haired old man (central to the auspicious Shikisanban rite) and Sanbasō masks, the black-faced counterpart whose stamping dance pleads for a good rice crop. Male and female Noh masks include Wakaonna (a young woman's face with downturned brows), Onna, Tobide and Kotobide (the wide-eyed "leaping-out" masks used for warrior spirits and minor deities), and Kasshiki (a Zen acolyte type). Demon-god masks (kishin) and long-nosed hanataka masks survive in a form that owes more to mountain ascetic ritual than to the proscenium of a Noh stage.

Several masks carry inked inscriptions on the reverse recording their dedication to the shrine, sometimes naming the donor, sometimes the occasion. Where such inscriptions are absent, the masks' provenance to Hakusan worship is inferred from their long, continuous residence in the same sacred precinct. The Agency for Cultural Affairs cites this concentration in a single shrine, paired with documentary evidence of dedication, as the basis for the designation.

A point of historical interest: the great fire of 1899 destroyed most of the shrine's halls, but priests and parishioners carried out the bulk of the treasures before flames reached them. The masks are among the works that survived because they were physically rescued in the chaos of that night.

The Masks in Living Use: Nagataki no Ennen

The collection is not merely a museum holding. The performance tradition it belonged to still continues each 6 January at the shrine's hall as the rite known as Nagataki no Ennen, designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property in 1977. Originally the closing day of a seven-day New Year shushōe service, the ennen here preserves an older format than the comparable rites at Hiraizumi's Mōtsū-ji. After elders deliver a confection-praising oration and toss sweets to the crowd, young performers move through a long sequence: ritual purification, child dancers' rambyōshi, rice-paddy songs, and the climactic mass dance (daishu-mai).

The festival is more popularly known as Hana-ubai Matsuri, the "Flower-Snatching Festival." Five large flower baskets are suspended six metres above the hall floor, and during the dances younger participants climb on one another's shoulders to seize blossoms from inside. A flower carried home is believed to bring good harvests, healthy silkworms, and prosperity to the household. Some of the masks now in the protected collection were used in such performances in centuries past; today, replicas and lesser-status masks fill the role on the day.

How to See the Masks

The 27 masks are not on permanent display together. They are kept in climate-controlled storage and rotated through two adjacent venues: the Hakusan Culture Museum (Hakusan Bunka Hakubutsukan) at Nagataki 402, and the Hakusan Taki Hōden treasure hall inside the shrine precincts at Nagataki 91. The museum and the treasure hall are operated separately from the shrine itself, and the Hōden closes during the winter months (late November through late April) because of heavy snowfall in this part of the Gunjō uplands. A combined ticket for the two facilities is available and costs less than two separate entries.

The most reliable time to see a substantial number of masks is during special exhibitions, which the museum mounts periodically. The 2016 exhibition "Old Masks Conveying the Performing Arts of Hakusan Faith," organised to mark 1,300 years of Hakusan ascetic tradition, displayed the entire 27-mask ensemble for the first time in a single setting, an unusual occasion that may not repeat in the near term.

The Wider Shrine and What Else to See

The shrine grounds reward a slow walk. A stone lantern dated 1302, of severe and beautifully proportioned andesite, stands at the centre of the precinct and is itself a separately designated Important Cultural Property. The shrine shares its compound with Nagataki-ji, the Buddhist temple from which it was administratively separated in 1868, and the two are connected by a single avenue of cedars. Inside the Taki Hōden are wooden statues of Shakyamuni and the Four Heavenly Kings, also nationally designated.

The Michi-no-Eki Hakusan Bunka no Sato Nagataki, four minutes on foot from the shrine, sells local Gunjō produce and makes a reasonable lunch stop. For travellers extending the visit, the shrine itself hosts a "Shirotori Haiden Odori" originating festival on 9 July, when summer night dances under hanging lanterns continue a tradition linked to the wider Gunjō dance culture; the Gunjō Odori of Hachiman, a few stations south, is among the country's best-known summer dance gatherings.