Peaceful Flower

Yasurai-bana: A Spring Dance That Calms the Plague Spirits of Kyoto

On the second Sunday of April, dancers in crimson robes and wild manes of red and black hair move through the streets of northern Kyoto, striking gongs and drums and leaping to the rhythm of flute and song. This is Yasurai-bana, a folk ritual better known to many visitors as the Yasurai Festival. It is performed in four districts north of the city center, and it carries two layers of recognition: the Agency for Cultural Affairs designated it an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property in January 1987, and in November 2022 UNESCO added it to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity as one of the Furyu-odori, a set of forty-one ritual dances drawn from communities across Japan.

The festival is anchored to the neighborhood around Imamiya Shrine in Murasakino, Kita Ward. Four local preservation societies keep it going, each tied to its own district: Imamiya (also called Ueno), Kawakami, Genbu, and Kamigamo. The first three perform on the same Sunday in April. The Kamigamo group holds its version separately, on May 15. Because each society has shaped its own arrangement of music and steps over the generations, no two performances look quite the same.

A Ritual Older Than Most of Kyoto's Famous Festivals

Written records place Yasurai-bana in Kyoto by the middle of the twelfth century. The Ryojin Hisho Kudensho, compiled in the late Heian period, and the Kamakura-era chronicle Hyakurensho both describe a Yasurai gathering held in the third lunar month of 1154. The name itself comes from the refrain of the dance song, yasurai hana ya, which the singers call out as the procession moves from place to place.

The purpose of the ritual is unusually specific. Yasurai-bana is a hana-shizume, a rite for quelling the flowers. People once believed that when cherry blossoms scattered in the spring wind, plague spirits scattered along with them and brought sickness into the city. The festival was the response: gather those wandering spirits, coax them into one place, and settle them. Imamiya Shrine itself grew from a site dedicated to calming pestilence, and its subordinate shrine, the Eyami-sha, enshrines Susanoo-no-Mikoto, a deity long associated with warding off disease.

When the national designation came in 1987, the value cited was Yasurai-bana's survival as a clear example of furyu, the showy, music-and-costume-driven performance style that flourished in medieval Japan. Specialists regard the structure of the procession and the form of the dance as evidence of how Japanese performing arts changed over the centuries, which is a large part of why the ritual was judged worth protecting.

What to Watch For: Umbrellas, Oni, and a Wild Dance

The heart of every procession is the furyu-gasa, a tall flower umbrella. Crimson cloth hangs from its rim, and a basket of fresh cherry and camellia blossoms is fixed at its crown. Spectators do not simply admire it from a distance. Standing beneath the umbrella is said to keep a person free of illness for the coming year, so wherever the procession pauses, onlookers press in to slip under it for a moment.

The dancing falls to four performers known as oni, or great oni. They wear a white kosode and white hakama beneath a crimson over-robe, and on their heads a shaguma, a long wig made of red or black yak hair. Two of them carry hand gongs, the other two carry drums. As the song builds, they shake the shaguma loose and throw themselves into the dance, the hair whipping around their shoulders while they strike their instruments. Two children move with them, called kanko or small oni, each with a small kakko drum tied to the chest and an eboshi cap set over the wig.

The Imamiya group is the largest. Its procession leaves Konen-ji, a temple in Murasakino, late in the morning, with roughly ninety participants splitting into two columns to wind through the parish before converging on Imamiya Shrine in the early afternoon. There the dancers offer their performance at the Eyami-sha, the plague shrine, then make their way back. If you want to see the dance at close range, the shrine grounds during the afternoon rites are the surest place. Along the street route the columns move steadily, and the crowd shifts with them.

Around Imamiya Shrine

Imamiya Shrine sits in a quiet pocket of Kita Ward, and the area rewards a longer visit. Just outside the east gate stand two aburi-mochi shops that have served the same grilled rice-flour cakes, dusted with soybean flour and brushed with sweet white miso, for centuries. One of them, Ichiwa, traces its founding to the year 1000, which makes a snack here a small encounter with history in itself.

A short walk south brings you to Daitoku-ji, a major Rinzai Zen temple complex famous for its sub-temples and its deep ties to the tea ceremony. The wooded slope of Mt. Funaoka rises nearby and offers an easy climb with views over the northern city. For those who want to follow the festival to its other settings, the Genbu group performs near Genbu Shrine and Unrin-in, while the Kamigamo version in May centers on the area around Kamigamo Shrine, itself a registered World Heritage site.

Imamiya Shrine is reached by city bus to the Imamiya-jinja-mae stop, or to the Funaokayama stop followed by a walk of about seven minutes. From Kitaoji Station on the Karasuma subway line, the shrine is roughly 1.6 kilometers to the west, about a twenty-minute walk.