Nitori's Site

Nitadori no Saitogi: A Winter Fire Ritual for Reading the Harvest

On the sixth day of the first month of the old lunar calendar, in the farming hamlet of Nitadori in Ninohe, at the northern edge of Iwate Prefecture, a tower of timber more than nine shaku tall, roughly 2.7 metres, is set alight in the precinct of Nitadori Hachiman Shrine. The direction its sparks drift on the cold night air, together with the state of a frozen offering of five grains, is read as a forecast of the year's harvest and weather. This is Nitadori no Saitogi, a divination rite the community has carried out for more than four hundred years.

The event belongs to a class of Japanese folk practice known as toshiura, the divining of the coming year. Rather than a prayer for a good harvest, it is an attempt to learn in advance what kind of year lies ahead, so that planting and daily life can be prepared accordingly. It takes place alongside the shrine's spring grand festival, which by the modern calendar usually falls in early February, in the depth of the northern Tohoku winter.

The Saitogi and What Its Name Means

The word saitogi is written in more than one way, and the variation is itself a clue to the rite's age. One form, 柴燈木, points to brushwood and lamp-fire; another, 祭齊, ties the structure to ritual purity. What stands in the shrine precinct is a square tower of logs stacked in an igeta, the crib pattern of a well frame, each layer crossing the one below at right angles.

Members of the community build it on the third of January. The finished tower rises above nine shaku, and on the night of the festival it is set burning. Taiko drums sound across the dark precinct. Men who have first completed a cold-water purification, wearing only fundoshi loincloths, take hold of the blazing tower and shake it, calling out as the sparks lift into the sky.

The reading is a matter of direction. Sparks that stream toward the stone steps below the shrine signal a good harvest. Sparks carried back toward the shrine building point to a poor one. The wind, in other words, is treated as a messenger, and the assembled villagers watch it closely.

The Okomori: An Offering Made of Frost

The second sign is quieter and easy to miss. Before the main hall sits the okomori, an offering of cooked grain. Five grains go into it: rice, barley, hie (Japanese barnyard millet), awa (foxtail millet), and kibi (proso millet). The mixture is boiled, pressed into a column shaped something like a sword blade, and left out to freeze solid through a single winter night.

When the offering is examined, its condition speaks. An okomori that has held its shape cleanly promises a productive year. One that has slumped or crumbled, or that shows insects, warns of a poor one. The five grains are not chosen at random; they cover the staple crops a mountain community of northern Iwate would once have depended on, so the offering reads the fortunes of the whole field at once.

Why the Rite Is Protected

On 11 March 2010 the national government selected Nitadori no Saitogi as an Intangible Folk Cultural Property requiring measures such as documentation. This category, often shortened in English to a Selected Intangible Folk Cultural Property, covers customs judged important enough that a careful record should be made of them while they are still practised.

Two qualities account for the recognition. The rite combines two distinct methods of divination, one by fire and wind, one by grain and frost, within a single observance, which is unusual. And it has been kept by an ordinary farming community over a long span, with the form passed from one generation to the next. The custodian is the parishioners' representatives' association of Nitadori Hachiman Shrine, the body responsible for organising the festival each year.

What a Visitor Sees

For anyone who comes, the saitogi is the part that holds the eye. A fire of that size against a snow-covered precinct, with drum-beats and the shouts of the loincloth-clad men, makes a strong impression on a freezing February night. It is worth arriving with enough time to see the tower before it is lit, while its crib structure is still clear, and then to find a spot from which both the stone steps and the shrine building are in view, since the whole question of the harvest turns on which way the sparks travel between them.

The okomori repays a closer, calmer look. Set against the spectacle of the fire, a frozen column of grain is undramatic, yet it carries equal weight in the verdict. In recent years the Ninohe City Tourism Association has at times invited a limited number of outside participants to join the cold-water procession, though this is arranged year by year. Anyone hoping to take part, rather than watch, should contact the association well in advance. In some winters the rite has been held as a shrine observance only, without a public component, so confirming the current year's plan before travelling is sensible.

Around Nitadori

Ninohe sits in the far north of Iwate, against the border with Aomori, in country shaped by the Mabuchi River. The shrine is reached by car in about fifteen minutes from the Joboji interchange of the Hachinohe Expressway, or twenty minutes from the Ichinohe interchange; the nearest rail point is Ninohe Station on the Tohoku Shinkansen.

The wider area rewards a longer stay. Tendai-ji, in the Joboji district, is among the oldest Tendai Buddhist sites in the Tohoku region, and its principal image, a standing Sho-Kannon carved from a single block of katsura wood, is a national Important Cultural Property. Basenkyo is a river gorge where two great rock formations, the Otokogami and Onnagami, face each other above the water; it has been a prefectural natural park since 1962. The earthwork remains of Kunohe Castle mark the site of the last battle in Toyotomi Hideyoshi's campaign to unify Japan, fought in 1591. For lodging, Kindaichi Onsen, a hot-spring settlement first recorded in 1626 and known locally for its tales of the zashiki-warashi house spirit, lies a short drive away.