Intangible Folk Cultural Properties Requiring Documentation of Kumamoto

At the Fuchinsai festival each August, neighborhood groups perform freshly written comic plays in local dialect, on truck-bed stages rolled through this Aso town.

This 33-act Izumo-line kagura at Nagano Aso Shrine in Minami-Aso, Kumamoto, is famed for the Tennoshime, where a fierce deity climbs a bamboo pole ten metres high.

At Nobara Hachimangu in Arao, Kumamoto, two boys in lion-head hats dance the furyu every 15 October, beating small and large drums to song and flute music.

On August 6 each year, mountain hamlets in southern Kumamoto stretch straw ropes over their streams, hung with woven figures of the star-crossed Tanabata lovers.

In Kumamoto's Aso highlands, masked dancers perform thirty-three numbers by firelight, staging the rock-cave myth of the sun goddess. Nationally selected in 1976.