The Demon Run of Dada Hall

Dadadō no Oni-hashiri: When the Oni Carry the Fire

On the night of January 14 each year, three masked figures shoulder burning pine torches and move through the dim wooden interior of a small temple hall in Gojō, in the far south of Nara Prefecture. Each torch stands roughly 1.1 metres tall and weighs close to 60 kilograms, and the men carry that weight with the left hand alone. Sparks scatter across the packed floorboards. The crowd pressed against the railings does not pull away. The embers are wanted here, because the figures wreathed in fire are oni, and at this temple the oni arrive to bless rather than to threaten.

The rite is called the Oni-hashiri, written with characters that read as the running of the oni. It takes place at Nenbutsuji, a temple in the Ōtsu neighbourhood of Gojō. The main hall where it unfolds has long been known as the Dadadō, and that local name attaches to the whole event. In December 1995 the Oni-hashiri became an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property of Japan, the first national designation of its kind awarded within the city.

A Rite Older Than Its Earliest Record

No document records when the Oni-hashiri began. What survives instead are clues. A set of demon masks used at the temple until 1960 carries an ink inscription dated to 1486, which means a masked rite was already being performed in the late fifteenth century. Those four masks are old enough to have earned their own status as a Tangible Folk Cultural Property of Nara Prefecture, and they now rest in retirement while replacements take their place in the hall.

The earliest written trace of the event itself appears in 1568, in a line referring to the oni torches of Nenbutsuji. A village register from 1773 goes further, setting down a sequence of rituals that matches what visitors see today almost point for point. Until 1957 the rite followed the old lunar calendar; the fixed date of January 14 dates from the shift that year to the modern calendar.

Nenbutsuji itself is older still. From the late Heian period it served as the parish temple of Sakaibe, a rural district along the Yoshino River, and it held a senior position among the local temples. It belongs today to the Shingon school of Buddhism and has no resident priest. The hall enshrines a standing image of Amida Nyorai as its principal object of worship, together with a seated figure of Kūkai, the founder of Shingon. In 2017 its thatched roof was completely renewed for the first time in about half a century.

Oni Who Are Not the Enemy

Rites that chase oni away are common across Japan. They descend from an old court ceremony of expulsion, and in most versions the oni stands for sickness and misfortune, something to be driven out so the new year can begin clean. The Oni-hashiri belongs to that wider family but inverts its logic. Here the oni are not pursued. They serve Amida Nyorai, and they are understood as ancestral spirits returning to the community to bless their descendants and carry in good fortune.

Three of them appear. The father oni wears a red mask and grips an axe in his right hand. The mother oni wears a blue mask and carries a length of twisted wood. The child oni wears a red mask and holds a mallet. This reversal, in which the figure of fear becomes a bringer of blessing, is what the national designation singles out as rare and worth protecting. The committee also recognised the way a single rural community has carried the rite forward for so long. The Oni-hashiri is run by fourteen settlements of the Sakaibe district, originally twelve villages joined by two more in 1889, together amounting to several hundred households who share the duties year after year.

The Order of the Fourteenth

The day builds slowly toward the fire. From around one in the afternoon, priests recite the Great Wisdom Sutra inside the hall. At four o'clock the first oni-hashiri takes place with the torches unlit, a daytime version that lets families and children see the figures clearly. A children's oni-hashiri follows, and then handfuls of lucky rice cakes are thrown to the crowd. An indoor fire ritual begins at seven, and an outdoor one at half past, raising the heat and the noise as the evening cools.

The night Oni-hashiri starts at nine. A small welcoming torch leads the performers in through the crowd that fills the precincts. A bell sounds, the priests' rapid chanting begins, and with it the dry knock of wooden staves struck together. The fire-bearer, a role called the Katte, comes forward first in a slow sliding step. He lifts his torch high and sweeps it through the air in the shape of the character for water, a gesture meant to keep the fire under control. Beside him another team, the water role, flicks water from buckets with bamboo branches to shield the Katte and quench embers that fall to the floor.

Then the three oni take the hall. They circle the interior with the great torches blazing on their shoulders, and the fire fills the wooden space with light and smoke. Reaching this moment has its own discipline behind it. The three men who play the oni begin a period of ritual abstinence on January 8, taking cold-water ablutions and keeping apart from ordinary household life. Paper cords prepared two days beforehand are tied at sixteen points across the oni's limbs, four on each hand and foot.

Reading the Fire

Several small customs cluster around the rite, and they reward a visitor who knows to look for them. The way the torches burn is read as a forecast of the coming rice harvest. Striking the board wall behind the altar with a stick is said to keep the shoulders from stiffening through the year. The paper cords bound to the oni, once untied, are kept as charms against misfortune, and the sparks that fall from the torches are believed to do the same for anyone they touch. A stone marker in the precincts records the rite's 510th performance, a quiet measure of how many winters this fire has been lit.

Visiting Gojō

Nenbutsuji stands in the Ōtsu neighbourhood of Gojō, near the Yoshino River in southern Nara Prefecture. The nearest railway is the JR Wakayama Line; from Yamato-Futami Station the temple is a long walk or a short taxi ride. The precincts have a small visitor car park on the east side, though on the night of the rite a separate lot at Ueno Park is used to absorb the crowds. The Oni-hashiri runs deep into a cold January night, so warm clothing and sturdy footwear matter as much as patience with the crowd.

The festival aside, Nenbutsuji can be visited quietly during the rest of the year to see the thatched Dadadō hall. A short distance away lies Gojō Shinmachi, a preserved townscape that grew up as a post town on the old Kishū road. White-walled merchant houses line about a kilometre of street, among them the Kuriyama Residence, an Important Cultural Property completed in 1607 and often described as the oldest private house in Japan that can be dated with certainty. Together the temple and the old town make Gojō a rewarding stop for travellers heading toward the Yoshino mountains.