Naked Crowds at Urasa Bishamon-Do

A Naked Push Through the Snow

On the first Saturday of March, inside a temple hall banked by more than two meters of snow, several hundred men strip to the waist and shove against one another until well past midnight. They are reaching for a single goal: a place close to the image of Bishamonten, the Buddhist guardian deity enshrined at the top of the hall. This is the Hadaka Oshiai, the "naked pushing," held at the Bishamonten Hall of Fukōji in the Urasa district of Minamiuonuma City, Niigata Prefecture.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs designated the custom an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property on March 8, 2018. The participants push not for sport but for prayer. Stripped of clothing and warmth in the depth of a Niigata winter, they ask Bishamonten to drive off misfortune and to grant a good rice harvest in the year ahead. Snow outside, body heat and candle flame inside: the contrast has earned the event its local nickname, a festival of snow and fire.

Fukōji is a Shingon Buddhist temple, and the hall where the pushing takes place stands within its precinct. Locals and visitors alike often call the whole event the Urasa Bishamondō Naked Pushing Grand Festival. The protected cultural property, strictly speaking, is the custom itself, the body of practices passed down by the community across many generations.

From a Frontier Hall to a Regional Festival

Temple tradition traces the Bishamonten Hall to the year 807, when the general Sakanoue no Tamuramaro is said to have built it and installed Bishamonten as a guardian image. How much of this is history and how much is legend cannot be settled, but the date gives the festival its often-repeated claim of roughly twelve centuries of continuity.

The pushing ritual itself has no clear founding record. It was once known simply as the Dōoshi, the "hall push." By the late Edo period it was a well-known event across the snow country of Echigo. The writer Suzuki Bokushi included it in his Hokuetsu Seppu, a celebrated account of life in the Uonuma snow region published in the 1830s, describing a hall grown so hot from the crowd that it seemed to burn.

The calendar tells its own story of change. The festival was long held on the third day of the First Month. When the Meiji government adopted the solar calendar in 1872, the date shifted to March 3. Since 2020 it has moved again, to the first Saturday of March, so visitors should always check the year's schedule before travelling.

Urasa grew up as a post town on the Mikuni Kaidō, the highway linking the Echigo plain with the interior, and as a river port on the Uono River. It also developed as a temple town around the Bishamonten Hall, and the periodic Bishamon market drew merchants and goods from across the district. When the Jōetsu Shinkansen opened in 1982 and Urasa gained a station on the line, access improved sharply, pilgrim numbers rose, and participants began arriving from well beyond the town.

Why the Festival Is Protected

National recognition came in two stages. In 2004 the practice was first selected as an intangible folk cultural property warranting documentation. Fourteen years later, in 2018, it was raised to the higher status of Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property.

The designation rests on the criterion that the custom shows, in a typical form, the foundations of ordinary Japanese life culture. Several features support that judgement. The festival is built on agricultural prayer, a worldview in which the welfare of a farming community depends on ritual care. It is sustained by a clear social structure rather than by individual enthusiasm. And it has kept a recognisable shape over a long span while still adapting, as the calendar shifts show.

Two human institutions carry the event. The first is the Urasa Tamon Youth Group, made up of local young men up to the age of thirty. Reorganised in 1952 from an earlier village youth group whose ranks had thinned, it assigns roles by age, from group leader down through officers for general affairs, the inner sanctum, the candles, and security. Serving in the festival functions as a rite of passage, a marker of a young man's place in the community. The second is the network of confraternities, or kō, lay groups spread mainly across Niigata that support the festival with funds and offerings, including the great candles and the ceremonial rice cakes.

What to Watch on the Night

The grand festival day begins quietly. From early morning the hall hosts a major goma fire ritual, the burning of wooden tablets before the deity, followed by a children's procession and the offering of rice cakes by the confraternities. Cakes exposed to the goma flame become "fortune cakes" and are later handed out and scattered to the crowd.

Once the daytime rites end, the hall is prepared for the pushing. A raised inner sanctum is set before Bishamonten, thick straw mats are laid across the floor, and the great candles on the four central pillars are lit. Each candle weighs roughly thirty to fifty kilograms and is made by a single local family using a method kept within the household. Their light is the reason the event is also called the great candle festival.

The participants prepare outside. Wearing a simple loincloth, a white sash wound around the belly, and white split-toe socks, they form processions and walk to the temple. In the precinct stands a stone water basin, and into it the men lower themselves up to the shoulders in the freezing dark. This cold-water purification is performed in a set order, the youth group first, then the candle confraternities, then schoolchildren and general participants. The youth group also offers a harvest dance, its movements imitating the cutting of rice.

Then the pushing begins. The men press into the hall and surge toward the inner sanctum. Only those who force their way through the crush and are pulled up by the sanctum officers are allowed to worship Bishamonten at close range. Three times during the night, offerings are scattered from the centre of the sanctum: rice cakes, grain seed, and small gold and silver cups. The offerings come in the form of wooden tokens, flung into the crowd, and the men scramble for them with the shouted cry of "Sanyo, Sanyo." After the festival the tokens are exchanged for the goods they name. At the same moment, bow-shaped paper lanterns are thrown from the roof of the neighbouring hall. They are usually torn apart in the scramble, but a single piece of the broken frame, placed at the water inlet of a rice paddy, is believed to secure a good crop.

The climax comes late at night. A man known as the toshi-otoko, a role held in turn by the head of one local family that has long served as custodian of the hall, is carried in on the shoulders of the youth group. Dressed formally in a courtier's robe and a tall lacquered cap, he faces the deity and rubs a bamboo rasp in time with a lead singer, chanting for a rich harvest. At that signal the men form rings around him, two and three deep, and circle counter-clockwise while stamping their feet. He is tossed into the air, the rasp is placed in the deity's cabinet, and the priest finally scatters twelve small images of Bishamonten moulded from the goma ashes, along with two sets of large mirror-shaped rice cakes. With that, the festival ends.

Around Urasa

The festival sits within easy reach of the wider Minamiuonuma area, a region known across Japan for its Koshihikari rice and for sake brewed with snowmelt water. The same heavy snowfall that frames the festival feeds the paddies the participants are praying for, which gives the rite a direct meaning here that a visitor can feel.

Urasa Station is on the Jōetsu Shinkansen, so the area is straightforward to reach from Tokyo or Niigata as a day trip, though the late-night timing of the pushing makes an overnight stay sensible. The hot-spring resort area around Echigo-Yuzawa lies a short train ride to the south, and the surrounding mountains hold several ski areas active through the festival season. For travellers interested in the snow country itself, the landscapes that Suzuki Bokushi recorded in Hokuetsu Seppu are still all around.