Tanegashima Homan Shrine's Rice Planting Festival

Hōman Shrine's Otaue Festival: Planting Red Rice on Tanegashima

Each year on April 3, before the sky has lightened over the southern coast of Tanegashima, a man dressed in white walks into the sea where the Miyase River meets the shore. He gathers wet sand into the fronds of about ten fern leaves, folds them into small bundles, and carries them home without speaking to anyone he passes. This purification, called Shuētori, opens the Otaue Festival of Hōman Shrine, a rice-planting rite held in the Kukinaga district of Minamitane, a town near the southern tip of the island in Kagoshima Prefecture.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs designated the festival an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property on March 2, 2016. Its custodian is a local group, the Hōman Shrine Red Rice Otaue Festival Preservation Society, and the ceremony itself is carried out by parishioners drawn from ten settlements across the surrounding farmland.

What distinguishes the event is the grain. The seedlings planted here are akagome, a red-husked rice often regarded as close to the ancestral form of the cultivated crop. Few communities in Japan still raise red rice as a sacred variety, and the parish of Hōman Shrine is one of them.

A Goddess, a Boat, and a Shrine Record from 1807

Hōman Shrine is the tutelary shrine of Kukinaga and enshrines the goddess Tamayori-hime. According to local tradition, when she settled here she carried red rice with her. The small triangular paddy used later in the ceremony, called the Funada or boat field, is said to represent the vessel that brought her to the island.

The exact origin of the festival is not known. A shrine document, the Hōmangū Engi, thought to have been written in 1807, already describes the rite, so it is clearly older than that record. The Kukinaga district itself lies on the most developed alluvial plain on Tanegashima, and rice has been grown here since ancient times. The island has long carried a reputation as one of the places where rice cultivation in Japan took early root.

One belief shows how seriously the community guards its red rice. Should the strain ever fail, parishioners would obtain white rice seedlings from the Otaue festival of Urata Shrine in Nishinoomote, plant those instead, and expect the red rice to return with the next harvest.

For generations the festival was held flexibly, ahead of the ordinary planting season. When early-maturing rice farming reshaped the local calendar in the 1930s and 1940s, keeping the old timing grew difficult. Since 1995 the date has been fixed to April 3.

Why the Festival Was Designated

Ceremonial rice-planting rituals of this kind, in which parishioners plant a shrine's sacred paddy to pray for a good harvest, are found across western Japan. The Hōman Shrine festival sits at the southern edge of that distribution and stands as a well-preserved, representative example of the form.

Two features drew particular attention from cultural authorities. The first is the moment when seedlings are received on a small sacred hill beside the paddies, a sequence that preserves an older shape of agricultural ritual. The second is the strong regional character of the event: the planting of red rice rather than ordinary rice, and the dance offered once the planting is finished. Together these qualities make the festival valuable for understanding how rice-cultivation rituals in Japan have changed and what they have meant.

What Happens on the Day

The ceremony unfolds about 200 meters north of Matsubarayama, the rise on which the shrine stands. Three sacred fields cluster around a wooded knoll roughly ten meters high called Mita-no-mori, the forest of the sacred field. To its northwest lies the Mita; to the north, a paddy named Osemachi; to the east, the small triangular Funada.

After the dawn purification, the priest places his fern-and-sand bundles at the foot and the summit of Mita-no-mori. At the top grows a hamagashi tree, an evergreen oak, and around it parishioners string a sacred rope. On a piece of coral set at its base they lay offerings: raw red rice, salt, two whole fish, vegetables, fruit, two bundles of red rice seedlings, and sake.

The priest then prays before the tree. Only men may climb the hill. When the prayer ends comes the rite of granting the seedlings, in which the priest hands two bundles to the head parishioner. One bundle goes to the head of the community hall, who plants it near the water inlet of Osemachi; the other goes to the married couple who will later dance at the Funada.

Planting begins once the inlet is set. Parishioners level the mud with a tool called an eburi, bundles of seedlings are tossed into the water, and about fifteen males, from elementary school age upward, line up shoulder to shoulder. To a planting song known as tsukuri-byōshi and the beat of a 50-centimeter drum, they step backward along a guide rope, setting each seedling carefully into the mud. The singer and the drummer are usually the same person. When Osemachi is done the planters move on to fill the Mita as well.

The most striking sequence is saved for the Funada. There the parishioner couple, the husband and wife in crested formal kimono and white tabi socks, offer the Otaue-mai, the rice-planting dance, also called the red rice dance. They face Mita-no-mori, the husband standing to the right and the wife to the left. Each holds red rice seedlings in both hands, presses the mud with both feet, and swings the seedlings down from eye height to the left and right, repeating the motion in time with the drum. The steps stand in for treading the soil and setting the rice. As they dance, another parishioner pours water into the field from a bucket. When the dance ends, the couple plants the seedlings they have been holding.

The day closes with a naorai, a shared meal, on mats spread beside the Funada. Diners are served simmered kelp, butterbur, and flying fish, along with two rice balls made from the previous year's red rice and wrapped in shell-ginger leaves, and a cup of sweet amazake. Eating this food, people say, brings a year free of illness.

Around the Shrine

Kukinaga sits in the south of Tanegashima, and the festival pairs naturally with the wider draws of Minamitane. The Tanegashima Space Center, Japan's largest rocket-launch site, lies within the same town and is open for tours of its facilities and museum. A short distance from the shrine, the sea cave of Chikura-no-iwaya opens onto a stretch of coast that can be explored at low tide.

Reaching the island takes some planning. High-speed jetfoils and ferries connect Kagoshima with Tanegashima, and there are flights to Tanegashima Airport. From the island's main towns the Kukinaga area is best reached by car. Anyone timing a visit to the festival should treat April 3 as fixed but confirm details locally before setting out.