Suisun's Mahayana Kagura

A Sacred Dance Where Mountain Asceticism Never Faded

Twice each year, on the first day of January and again on 15 September, performers carry their masks and instruments to a modest shrine in the Susumago district of Kitakami, in southern Iwate Prefecture. Between every dance, someone raises a conch shell and sounds a long, low note across the room. The dancers hold not the small hand bells that accompany most Japanese sacred dance, but the shakujo, the ringed metal staff of a Buddhist mendicant.

Those two details say a great deal about Susumago no Daijo Kagura. It is a form of village ritual dance in which the practices of mountain asceticism were never fully smoothed away.

Kagura is the broad name for dance offered to the kami, the deities of Shinto. In the mountains of Iwate, a distinct branch known as yamabushi kagura took shape in the hands of the yamabushi, the ascetic priests of Shugendo, a religion that blended Buddhism, Shinto and mountain worship. Daijo kagura is one strand of that tradition, carried in the old Waga district around the cities of Kitakami and Hanamaki. The Susumago troupe is among the strands most strongly marked by its religious roots, and for that reason it is often called Waga Daijo Kagura after the wider area.

From a Medieval Temple to a Meiji Revival

Local tradition reaches back a long way. By one account, the dance began in 1315, when a priest named Tamaki Meisuke returned from training at Shogo-in, a great centre of Shugendo in the Higashiyama hills of Kyoto, and founded a temple called Kitokuin in Susumago. The kagura performed there came to be known as Kitokuin Hoin Kagura. Whether the dance is quite that old is difficult to verify. The troupe's own transmission traces it to the late medieval period, and the national cultural property record gives no founding date, so the fourteenth-century origin is best treated as cherished local memory rather than documented fact.

The written trail grows firmer in the nineteenth century. Records show kagura being performed around Manboin, a temple in the old village of Minami-Sasama, now part of Hanamaki. Joint gatherings of several troupes, called daijo-e, were held at Manboin in 1849 and at the temple of Jishoin in Kitakami in 1875.

The present line of transmission has a clearer beginning. Near the close of the Keio era, around 1867, a man named Sato Torajiro learned the dances from a yamabushi of Manboin and revived the Kitokuin kagura, which by then had lapsed. That revival is regarded as the start of today's Waga Daijo Kagura.

Classification took time to settle even in the modern era. In 1974 the Susumago dance was listed as a prefectural cultural property under the heading of yamabushi kagura, together with a troupe from Hanamaki. Later study showed that daijo kagura and ordinary yamabushi kagura had diverged enough to deserve separate treatment, so the original listing was withdrawn and reissued, this time distinguishing the yamabushi kagura of Hanamaki from the daijo kagura of Waga.

Why the Dance Was Singled Out for Preservation

On 8 December 1978 the national government placed Susumago no Daijo Kagura on its register of intangible folk cultural properties for which documentation should be carried out. This category sits a step below formal designation. It marks traditions judged important enough that careful records must be made of them, a recognition of national significance and, often, of a fragility that makes such records urgent. The Susumago Daijo Kagura Preservation Society carries the responsibility of keeping the dance alive. Within Iwate, the kagura is also a prefecturally designated property, listed as one of five daijo kagura troupes of the Waga area.

What gives the dance its value is how much of the old religious craft it still contains. The repertoire numbers thirty-three pieces, built on the medieval idea of honji suijaku, the belief that Shinto deities are local manifestations of Buddhist figures. As the dances unfold, the Buddhist identity behind each kami is named and explained. The choreography carries this further. Dancers form the kuji, a sequence of nine ritual hand signs used in Shugendo prayer, and the precise placing of hands and feet follows ascetic convention rather than theatrical effect. Some pieces may be danced only by a performer who has completed seven days of austerities and earned the rank of hoin, a senior religious title. Few surviving kagura traditions hold their ritual discipline this close to the surface, and that is the quality the 1978 listing was meant to protect.

What to Watch For

The name daijo refers to a canopy once hung above the centre of the stage in hoin kagura, the parent style. The traditional staging was elaborate. Sacred bamboo stood at the four corners of the dancing ground, a small shrine to the heavenly deities was set on one side, and cauldrons were placed at the northeast and southwest corners, the directions of the demon gate and the rear gate, linked by a thick rope of twisted straw.

Among the thirty-three pieces, the lion-head Gongen dance is the most important. A carved lion head stands as the vessel through which the deity enters the world, and the dance calls on its power to drive away misfortune, guard against fire and ask for good harvests and health. Other pieces draw on Buddhist drama. Sakaki-mai presents Gundari Myoo, one of the Five Wisdom Kings and guardian of the west, and is counted the highest of the prayer dances; it is among those reserved for a hoin. Kanemaki tells of a wealthy man's only daughter who enters a temple closed to women, breaks the prohibition, turns into a vengeful being and is finally led to release by a monk's prayer, a story close to the famous Dojoji legend. Ryuden sets two masked dragon deities against each other in a vigorous sword dance meant to subdue evil.

Visitors who know other Iwate kagura will notice the contrast with Hayachine Kagura, the celebrated dance of nearby Hanamaki. If Hayachine is brisk and Shinto in flavour, a kagura of motion, Daijo kagura is its quieter counterpart, slow in gesture and concerned above all with conveying Buddhist teaching. The conch shell sounded between pieces, a habit inherited from mountain ritual, sets the unhurried pace.

Around Kitakami

Susumago lies in Wagacho, a rural part of Kitakami, and the kagura is rooted in the life of that small community rather than staged for visitors. The most reliable way to see it is at one of the city's folk performance events. Kitakami is known across Japan as a stronghold of folk performing arts, home to more such troupes than any other city, and the Kitakami Michinoku Geino Matsuri each August brings more than a hundred of them together. The Susumago group also appears at winter kagura gatherings and at the Michinoku Folk Village festival.

The same trip rewards a longer stay. The most famous local dance is Onikenbai, a fierce sword dance performed by masked figures said to represent the wrath of the Buddha. Tenshochi, the riverside park along the Kitakami River, is one of the finest cherry blossom sites in the Tohoku region in spring. The Michinoku Folk Village preserves old farmhouses in an open-air setting, and the Oni no Yakata museum is devoted to the masks and lore of demons in regional culture.