Kasuga Shrine Entertainment Stage

What the Kasuga Shrine Entertainment Stage Is

Kasuga Shrine Entertainment Stage (春日神社余興舞台, Kasuga Jinja Yokyo Butai) is a 1952 festival stage at the otabisho of Mikasayama Kasuga Shrine in Kusaji, Bungotakada City, Oita Prefecture, registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on October 28, 2011. An otabisho is the place where a shrine's portable shrine rests during a festival procession; this one lies about 1 kilometre from the main grounds, and the stage faces south across it.

It is a single-storey timber building with a footprint of 115 square metres, 16 metres by 7.9 metres, under a hip-and-gable roof (Irimoya-zukuri) of cement tiles with lean-to extensions (Geya) on the gable ends. The southern half is the stage and the northern half the dressing room. Apart from the open front, the walls are clad in overlapping horizontal boards (Shitami-itabari), and the roof is carried on a traditional Japanese timber truss (Wagoya).

Why It Was Registered

The Agency for Cultural Affairs calls the Kasuga Shrine Entertainment Stage a traditional rural stage. Villages across Japan built such stages at shrines and temples so that plays and performing arts could be offered at festivals, with the audience watching from open ground in front.

It is the youngest of the 13 registered structures, built only a few years after the war. The roof uses cement tiles, a material that spread in that period, but the form and framing (hip-and-gable roof, board cladding and Japanese truss) follow the old pattern. New material inside a traditional village-stage design is the point of interest.

It is also the only registered building outside the main precinct. The procession hall at the otabisho was rebuilt in 2002 and is not registered, so the stage is the sole registered structure there.

What to Look For

Go round to the south side and look at the opening. The front half of the building is stage and the back half dressing room, and only the front is left open, in contrast to the boarded sides and rear.

Look at the ground around it too. There is a sumo ring in front of the stage to the south, and the procession hall and a war memorial stand on the same grounds. According to the shrine, the portable shrine comes down to the otabisho on the fourth Saturday of October and stays the night; the first day brings a karaoke contest and other entertainments, the second a memorial service for the war dead and stage performances, and the youth association runs food stalls on the grounds. The Kasuga Shrine Entertainment Stage belongs to that village festival.

Visiting the Entertainment Stage

The Kasuga Shrine Entertainment Stage is not in the Mikasayama grounds but at the Ozono otabisho, about 1 kilometre away. On ordinary days you see it from outside; the stage and dressing room are not open. The two days of the autumn festival are when the otabisho is busiest and when you are most likely to see the stage in use. Directions and general visiting information are on the Mikasayama Kasuga Shrine page.