Horanya in Higashibojo

Higashibojo no Horan'ya: A Bon Fire Festival of Giant Torches

On the afternoon of August 15, in a quiet farming district at the southwestern edge of Kashihara City, men in cotton yukata hoist torches the size of small vehicles onto carrying poles and set them alight. The largest of these flame columns reaches roughly three meters in height, two meters across, and weighs about five hundred kilograms. Bearers circle the gravel grounds of two old shrines, shouting Essa, hoisa! beneath columns of smoke. This is Higashibōjō no Horan'ya, one of Nara Prefecture's most physically demanding Obon rituals, and one of the few surviving examples in the region of a midsummer fire rite paired with the New Year's sagicho bonfires of the older Japanese calendar.

The festival takes its name from the chant once used by the torch bearers. Over the generations, horan'ya shifted from cry to identity—it is now the word for the event itself.

A Bon Fire Festival with Older Roots

To understand why the men of Higashibōjō go to such lengths each summer, it helps to step back to a time when the Japanese year was reckoned in two halves rather than four seasons. The first half opened with sagicho, the mid-January fire ritual at which New Year decorations are burned, and the second half opened with summer fire rites of this kind—events meant to chase off the spirits of disease, drought, and crop-eating insects before the heat of August set in. Cultural authorities consider Horan'ya a textbook example of the second category, and a rare intact survivor of its type within Nara.

The fire eventually folded into the Bon observance, the August period when the souls of ancestors are believed to return home. At Higashibōjō, that overlap explains why a ritual of clearly Buddhist character is held within Shinto shrine grounds. A small hall dedicated to the cosmic Buddha Dainichi still stands inside the Hachiman precinct—a quiet reminder of how thoroughly Buddhism and Shinto wove together in village religious life before the Meiji-era separation of the two traditions.

Local memory contributes another layer of explanation. According to oral tradition, the rite was once cancelled, an outbreak of illness followed, and from then on the village kept the schedule without fail. The modern era has tested even that resolve: pandemic-related cancellations from 2020 onward have temporarily interrupted the long unbroken run, with the city announcing in 2025 a sixth consecutive year of suspending the torch procession while retaining the shrine ceremonies.

Why It Earned National Recognition

Prefectural recognition came in March 1982, when Nara designated the festival as an Intangible Folk Cultural Property of the prefecture. In March 2020, the national Agency for Cultural Affairs added Horan'ya to its register of intangible folk cultural properties for which official documentation should be prepared—selection number 627, under the category of customs and annual observances.

The official rationale singled out two qualities. First, Horan'ya preserves an unusually pure form of the Bon-season fire ritual, structured as the counterpart of the New Year's sagicho rites that survive elsewhere in Japan. Second, within Nara Prefecture, where most such midsummer torch rites have died out, the Higashibōjō tradition is among the last living examples of its kind. The Agency uses "selection" rather than "designation" because the property does not have a fixed visible form—what is being protected is a practice, and the protection takes the shape of detailed recording and support for the local preservation body.

What Happens on the Day

Preparation begins before sunrise on August 15. In each of the participating districts—Ōkita, Kawabata, Yumiba, Degaito, and Manda of Higashibōjō, plus Furukawa from the neighboring town—men aged fifteen and over gather to build the torches. The core is bundled rapeseed stalks, wheat straw, and bamboo grass. The outer cladding is split green bamboo, wrapped in vertical strips and lashed with rough rope until the body is firm. Three to five turns of shimenawa rope cinch the waist of each torch. A shide paper streamer is fixed to the top binding, and a decorative straw twist called ebi ("shrimp," for its curled shape) is attached to the front face. A single large torch can occupy a team of villagers for most of the morning.

By early afternoon the larger torches—up to three meters tall, two meters across, and roughly five hundred kilograms—are ready to move. Smaller yaku-matsu torches, each about a meter tall and thirty kilograms, accompany them. The night before, on August 14, a small "evening torch" from the Murajima family of Kawabata's old "Shimo no Kuruma-ya" household is already burned at Hachiman Shrine as a quiet curtain-raiser.

Around 1 p.m. on the 15th, bearers carry four large torches and two yaku-matsu into the grounds of Kasuga Shrine in the Yumiba district. Around 3 p.m. the action shifts to Hachiman Shrine in Manda, about a kilometer to the east, where six large and three small torches arrive in turn. The total of sixteen torches across the two shrines makes Horan'ya the largest single-day torch event in the prefecture.

Each torch laps the grounds clockwise once unlit, then receives fire from the priest's lamp and laps twice more while burning. The large ones are bound horizontally to three carrying poles called ōko and shouldered like a portable shrine, with the bearers in yukata and headcloths surging beneath the flame. At intervals they stop dead, then heave the burning bundle violently to one side and the other while the cry shifts to Wasshoi, wasshoi! When a torch finishes its circuit, the bearers stand it upright in the center of the precinct and leave it to burn down before the altar—an offering rather than a discarded prop.

The order of presentation has been fixed for generations. At Kasuga the sequence runs Yumiba, Kawabata, Ōkita, Degaito. At Hachiman: Ōkita, Kawabata, Yumiba, Manda, Degaito, and finally the largest torch of all, brought by Furukawa. After the last yaku-matsu burns out and the bearers and elders exchange the ritual hand-claps from the prayer hall, the village's summer protection has been renewed for another year.

Watching Without Getting in the Way

Horan'ya is open to the public without admission, and the shrine grounds at both Kasuga and Hachiman are unenclosed. That openness comes with a responsibility for the visitor. Five hundred kilograms of burning bamboo on the move is no place for inattention; the bearers cannot see well around the flame, and embers fall freely. Stewards stake out a viewing perimeter on the day, and the smartest position is along the inner side of that line, on the side opposite the procession route, with both hands free.

Photography is generally permitted. Flash is discouraged during the moments of prayer, and long lenses serve better than getting close. The lighting is dramatic at dusk if the schedule has run long, with the orange flame against the green of the precinct trees making for some of the most striking festival images in Nara.

Around the Shrines

Higashibōjō sits at the southwestern edge of Kashihara, a city better known for its imperial associations than for its farming neighborhoods. A short train ride or bicycle trip north reaches Kashihara Jingū, the Shinto complex consecrated in 1890 on what tradition identifies as the site of Japan's first emperor's enthronement.

Beyond it, Imai-chō—an Edo-period merchant town of around five hundred preserved buildings, a nationally designated Important Preservation District—offers a quieter counterpoint to the festival's noise. East of central Kashihara lies the Fujiwara Palace Site, a national special historic site where the first true Chinese-style capital of Japan stood between 694 and 710. The site is now a flat expanse of seasonal flower fields flanked by the three sacred mountains of Yamato: Unebi to the southwest, Mimi-nashi to the north, and Kagu-yama to the east. The Fujiwara-Asuka area is currently on Japan's tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage inscription.

For visitors arriving on August 15 specifically for the torches, a half-day before the festival can comfortably take in Imai-chō and Fujiwara, with dinner near Kashihara-jingū-mae station before the short trip south to Bōjō.