Oyama Memorial Rice Planting in Shiobara

A Rice Field Where the Oxen Are Honored

Once every four years, in the last week of May, a single paddy field in front of Ishi Shrine fills with drums, song, and the slow tread of fifteen to twenty oxen. Each animal wears a thick red cord wound around its head and a decorated saddle across its back. They have not been brought here only to work. The Shiobara no Daisen Kuyo Taue, registered as an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property of Japan on 12 February 2002, is a cooperative rice planting that is also a memorial service for the cattle and horses on which an entire mountain region once depended.

The event takes place in Shiobara, a hamlet in the Tojo district of Shobara City, in the far northeast of Hiroshima Prefecture near the Okayama border. It is not a daily or even a yearly sight. Visitors who arrive in the right spring see something most people in Japan have never witnessed: a working farm task carried out as ceremony, with prayers for animals woven through every stage.

Why a Mountain Region Mourned Its Cattle

The name carries its own explanation. Daisen refers to Mount Daisen, the great peak that rises across the prefectural line in Tottori. Across the uplands of old Hoki, Izumo, Mimasaka and northern Bingo, farmers placed their faith in Daisen Chimyo Daigongen, a deity invoked for the safety of working cattle and horses. Branch shrines stood on hilltops throughout the Tojo area, and a Daisen shrine sits near the summit of Mount Oigatsuji, southeast of Shiobara.

This devotion was practical. The hills around Shiobara were worked for iron. Tatara smelting, which drew iron from local sand, demanded constant movement of charcoal and ore, and oxen and horses carried both. The same animals plowed the rice paddies. A household's livelihood rested on their backs, and when one died by accident or hardship, its loss was felt and remembered.

Rice planting itself, before machines, was heavy collective labor. Several farms in Tojo would plant together, and at least one person joined each group whose job was to beat a drum and sing the planting songs that set the rhythm of the work. Locals called this drum-led planting taikodaue or shigotoda, and it continued in everyday farming until around 1945. The largest fields, often those of major landholders, closed the season with a festive, large-scale planting known as otaue. The Daisen memorial planting grew from the joining of that celebratory otaue with the practice of honoring animals. A medieval picture scroll, the Daisenji Engi Emaki, already shows a memorial rice planting in its illustrations, so the custom is understood to reach back centuries.

How the Tradition Was Recognized

By the postwar decades, mechanized planting had erased the drum-led fields from ordinary life. In 1975 the rite was selected by the national government as an intangible folk cultural property requiring documentation. Public performances followed in 1976 and 1980, and from 1985 the event settled into its present rhythm, staged every fourth year in the paddy in front of Ishi Shrine. The national designation as an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property came in 2002.

What earned the recognition is the completeness of what survives here. The Shiobara rite preserves the working structure of pre-mechanization cooperative planting, from the marking rope to the call-and-response songs, and it binds that labor to a layered religious observance. It should not be confused with the better-known hanadaue flower planting of western Hiroshima, which celebrates a good harvest. The purpose at Shiobara is specifically the repose of animal spirits and the safety of the living herd, alongside prayers for a fruitful year. In 2014 the preservation effort received a national award for the conservation and transmission of regional performing arts.

A Day Built Around the Animals

Preparation begins the day before. Near the field, villagers raise a kuyodana, a memorial structure built of logs. It takes the form of a gate, roughly eight meters wide and three meters deep, with a floor about two meters high and a passage running through its center. The two sides are not the same: facing the field, the left of the passage is set for Buddhist rites, the right for Shinto. Men also build a small earthen mound at one end of the field ridge and plant in it branches of holly and twelve stalks of pampas grass. This is the sanbai-yashiro, the place where the deity of the rice field is welcomed.

On the morning of the event, after nine o'clock, oxen are led to the community hall from Shiobara and the surrounding settlements. Their handlers wind red cords around the animals' heads and fit them with ornamental saddles, then fix the order in which they will walk.

Just past noon the rice-planting dance opens the ceremony. A procession forms: a tengu-masked figure clearing the way, a bearer of paper streamers, a song leader carrying wooden clappers, a comic masked figure called the sasarasuri, drummers in white happi coats and sedge hats with small drums at their waists, and rows of young women planters, the saotome, in matching cotton robes. Partway along, the saotome gather into a circle and dance, their movements drawn from the gestures of planting itself, carried by song and drum.

When the dance ends, the decorated oxen file toward the memorial structure, where a Shinto priest performs a purification and a Buddhist monk recites for the dead. As each ox passes through the gate, its owner receives a small paper streamer from the priest and, from the monk, a memorial tablet and a single volume of the Great Wisdom Sutra. These are fixed to the animal before it enters the water. Inside the paddy, the line of oxen walks a deliberately complex route, churning the flooded soil into the smooth bed that planting requires.

The planting itself is the climax. Saotome in indigo-dyed kimono, their heads wrapped in cloth, return in procession with the drummers, joined now by three young girls. At the structure the girls receive bundles of sanbainae, the first seedlings, and three lead planters receive small streamers. The first stalks set into the field must come from these bundles. To keep the rows even, a rope marked at fixed intervals is stretched the width of the paddy, held taut by three men who press it down against the surface. At a signal from the clappers, the song leader sings the first half of a verse and the planters answer with the second as they set the seedlings. When a row is finished the rope is lowered one width, the women step back, and the next verse begins. Through all of it the masked sasarasuri moves among the workers, prodding the planters with a notched stick to draw laughter from the crowd. The following day, the rite closes quietly with an offering of paper talismans at the Daisen shrine on Mount Oigatsuji.

Planning a Visit

This is not an event that can be caught on a casual trip. It is held only once every four years, on a Sunday in late May, with the program running from late morning to about three in the afternoon. Anyone hoping to attend should confirm the date in advance through Shobara City tourism information, since the year and exact day vary.

The venue is the field beside Ishi Shrine in Shiobara. On event days the roads around the site are closed and there is no parking at the field itself. Visitors are directed to park at the former Onoka middle school, from which a shuttle bus runs to the venue. By car, the area is reached from the Tojo interchange on the Chugoku Expressway; from central Hiroshima the drive is long, as Tojo sits at the meeting point of three prefectures.

Around Shiobara and Tojo

The Tojo district rewards a longer stay. Its best-known landmark is Taishakukyo, a limestone gorge stretching some 18 kilometers along the border of Shobara City and Jinsekikogen. Its centerpiece is Onbashi, a natural stone bridge about 90 meters long and 40 meters high, among the largest of its kind in Japan. The gorge also holds the Hakuun-do limestone cave and, downstream, the man-made Shinryu Lake, where pleasure boats pass beneath cliffs that turn vivid in spring and autumn.

The center of Tojo is an old castle town with a retro main street, long known for tatara iron, sake and vinegar brewing, and lime production. The Sanrakuso, a finely built merchant house from the Meiji era, is open to visitors and gives a sense of the town's prosperous past. Given the festival's subject, there is a fitting local specialty to seek out: Hiba beef, a prized wagyu raised in this same cattle-keeping region.