Oyama Memorial Rice Planting

Daisen Kuyō Taue: A Rice Planting That Mourns the Working Ox

Once every fourth year, in a mountain hamlet in the northeast corner of Hiroshima Prefecture, about twenty oxen are led one by one through a wooden gateway. Their heads are wrapped with thick red cord and their backs carry decorated saddles. On the left of the passage sits a Buddhist monk; on the right, a Shinto priest. As each animal passes beneath the structure, both men pray together for the souls of cattle and horses that died unexpectedly, and for the safety of those still at work in the fields. This is the heart of the event known as Daisen Kuyō Taue.

The full designated name is Shiohara no Daisen Kuyō Taue. It takes place in the Shiohara district of Tōjō-chō, in Shōbara City, on a flooded paddy in front of Ishi Shrine. At its simplest it is a communal rice planting set to drumming and song. What sets it apart is that the planting is bound together with a memorial rite for the oxen and horses that once powered local life. Because that memorial draws on the regional faith in the deity of Mount Daisen, the people of Shiohara call the whole observance a Daisen kuyō, or Daisen memorial, rice planting.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs designated it an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property on 12 February 2002. It had already been singled out in 1975 as a property requiring official documentation, a status that recognized its value before full designation.

Why Oxen Are Mourned Here

Shiohara sits in country that was shaped by iron. Across the surrounding hills, villagers smelted iron from river sand in the old tatara method, and oxen and horses were indispensable: they pulled the plow in spring and hauled charcoal and finished iron along the mountain tracks the rest of the year. An animal that could work was wealth, and an animal that died was a loss felt by the whole household.

The remedy people reached for was the worship of Daisen Chimyō Daigongen, a guardian of cattle and horses associated with Mount Daisen in what is now Tottori Prefecture. Throughout the old provinces of Hōki, Izumo, Mimasaka, and the northern reaches of Bitchū and Bingo, this faith was woven into daily farming life. Communities enshrined the deity on their own high ground, and around Shiohara that shrine is the Daisen Shrine near the summit of Mount Ōigatsuji, founded by inviting the spirit from the Daisen shrine in Tottori.

Planting rice was, before machines, a job that needed many hands. Several households in Tōjō would plant together, and at least one person in the group beat a drum and sang to set the rhythm of the work. People called this style of planting taikotaue or shigotoda, and it continued in the area until around 1945. The last and grandest planting of the season, done on a major landholder's field, was the ootaue, a celebratory finish to the work. Daisen Kuyō Taue grew where this festive ootaue met the memorial side of the Daisen faith, and the two became a single occasion.

What Earned the Designation

Hiroshima has several famous planting festivals. In the Aki region to the west, Aki no Hayashida and Mibu no Hanadaue draw large crowds with showy drumming, the players bending backward and tossing their sticks to one another inside the paddy. Shiohara's planting is deliberately quieter. Here the drummers and singers stay up on the ridge between the fields rather than performing in the mud, and the planting itself keeps the practical shape of real farm work guided by drum and song. Folklorists value it precisely for this restraint: it preserves what rice planting looked like before it developed into spectacle.

The origin date is unknown, but the practice is old. A medieval picture scroll, the Daisenji Engi Emaki, includes an illustration of a memorial rice planting, which tells us the form was already in use by the Middle Ages. The event also keeps alive a striking example of Shinto-Buddhist syncretism, the blended worship that was widespread before the two religions were forced apart in the nineteenth century. At the memorial gateway a priest performs the great purification and a monk performs the Buddhist dedication, side by side, for the same animals.

The observance is built from five parts: a rice-planting dance, the memorial rite for the animals, the puddling of the paddy by oxen, the planting set to drum and song, and the delivery of a sacred tablet to Daisen Shrine the following day. In 2012 the event received a national award for the preservation and transmission of regional performing arts.

What to Look For on the Day

The morning belongs to the animals. From around nine o'clock, oxen gather from Shiohara and the surrounding settlements at the community hall, where handlers wind red cord around their heads and fit them with ornamental saddles before sorting out the order of the procession.

Early afternoon opens with the rice-planting dance. A procession forms: a tengu-masked figure clearing the way, a bearer of paper streamers, a song leader clapping wooden blocks, a comic figure in a grotesque mask scraping a notched bamboo rasp, drummers in white happi coats and sedge hats with small drums lashed to their waists, and rows of saotome, the planting maidens, in matching cotton yukata. The maidens form a ring and dance steps drawn from the motions of planting, timed to the song and the drum.

Then the decorated oxen file toward the wooden memorial structure, where the priest and monk are already at work. Passing beneath it, each owner receives a small paper streamer from the priest and a memorial tablet and a volume of the Great Wisdom Sutra from the monk, which are fixed to the animal before it enters the paddy. Inside the field the oxen walk a carefully fixed path to puddle the mud for planting.

The planting that follows is worth watching closely. A long rope marked at set intervals is stretched across the paddy as a guide so the seedlings land in even rows; three men press it down into the water. At the clap of the wooden blocks the song leader sings the first half of a verse and the maidens answer with the second half as they push the seedlings in. When a row is done the rope drops one width, the maidens step back, and a new song begins. The rasp-player keeps poking at the maidens to draw laughter, a reminder that this was, after all, a celebration as much as a rite.

Around Shiohara and Getting There

Shiohara is a small settlement in the northern hills of Tōjō, an area that meets the Okayama border. The venue is the paddy in front of Ishi Shrine. The closest town center is Tōjō, reached by the JR Geibi Line, and drivers come off the Chūgoku Expressway at the Tōjō interchange. This is genuine mountain country, so a car is the practical way to explore the wider district.

The performance is not held every year. It is staged on site roughly once every four years in late May, and the planning, the gathering of oxen, and the costumes make it a project for the whole community. On showing days the lanes near the shrine are closed to traffic and parking is arranged at the former Onukka junior high school, with a shuttle bus running to the site. The most recent on-site public performance took place on 31 May 2026, the first held with an audience in eight years after the previous round was carried out without spectators. Anyone hoping to attend a future showing should check the schedule with Shōbara City well in advance, since dates fall only every four years and can shift.

The same corner of Tōjō rewards a longer look. The Onukka district keeps several other registered cultural assets nearby, among them the Hiba Kōjin Kagura sacred dance and notable old cherry trees, so a trip timed to the planting can take in more than the single day's event.