Field Mastery

Nobaru no Mastoriya: A Harvest Rite Shaped by the Poll-Tax Years of Miyako

On the night of the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, when the harvest moon rises over the Miyako Islands, the small community of Nobaru gathers in the plaza in front of its public hall. The event is called the Mastoriya, and the people of this district in Ueno, Miyakojima City, have kept it for roughly three hundred years. It combines a day of quiet prayer with a night of vigorous stick dancing and slow, solemn women's dance, set to songs in the local Miyako tongue.

The day begins long before the dancing. On the morning of the fifteenth, a tsukasa, the female ritual leader of the community, makes a circuit of eleven utaki, the sacred groves scattered through the settlement. At each she gives thanks for the health and the harvest of the past year and asks for prosperity in the year to come. By the time the moon is high, that gratitude has turned into celebration.

In the late afternoon the men assemble at four houses known as the masumutu. The village has long been divided into four groups, and each keeps one such house. Three days earlier, every household contributed foxtail millet, which was brewed into miki, a sacred rice-and-millet drink. The men share it before the younger ones take up their staves and head for the festival ground, while the women dancers make their way there directly.

Why the Festival Was Selected for Preservation

On December 12, 1980, the national government placed the Mastoriya on its list of Intangible Folk Cultural Properties Requiring Measures Such as Documentation. This is a distinct category from the better-known Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property. Rather than a formal designation conferring the highest protection, the listing marks a tradition as significant enough to merit official recording and support, often because it is locally specific and vulnerable to fading. The custodian of the tradition is the Nobaru Folk Performing Arts Preservation Society, which carries the responsibility of passing the songs and dances to the next generation.

What sets the Mastoriya apart is its tie to one of the harshest chapters in Miyako history. From the seventeenth century into the early twentieth, the islands lived under a per-capita grain-and-cloth levy, a poll tax that pressed heavily on ordinary families. The very name of the festival is thought to reach back to that system. One reading connects masu to the act of taking a homestead, suggesting the dance once belonged to a village-founding day. Another, more often repeated locally, traces it to the masu-toriya, the house of the official who measured tax grain with a wooden masu box. The opening song states plainly that this is no ordinary dance, that it may be performed only with the permission of the local headman. In that line the memory of taxed and regulated lives still carries.

Cultural authorities regard the rite as preserving, in unusually complete form, the old shape of a lunar harvest-moon agricultural ceremony together with its songs and dances. Among the performing traditions of the Miyako Islands it stands as something genuinely unusual.

What to Watch on the Night

When the moon is bright, around nine in the evening, men and women converge on the hall plaza and the performance proper begins. Young men present the bo-odori, a stick dance in four groups. It is forceful work: staves cracking against staves in time with shouted calls, the sound carrying across the open ground.

The women's dance is its opposite in mood. The performers form several columns. Those in front hold a kuba fan cut from the leaf of the fan palm; those behind play yotsudake, paired bamboo clappers. White headbands trail long down their backs. They move at a deliberate, unhurried tempo, faces set in earnest concentration, to a melancholy song called aagu. Two forms are danced, known as dagi-odori and nagi-odori.

Only when the Mastoriya dance has ended does the night lift into open joy. Hands rise and feet lift in the maki-odori, the winding dance, and finally everyone joins the kuicha, the communal circle dance particular to the Miyako Islands, which carries the gathering on toward the small hours. The arc of the evening, from grave to glad, is the heart of what visitors come to feel.

Around the Festival

The Mastoriya takes place at the plaza of the Nobaru Public Hall in the Ueno area of Miyakojima City, in the island's south. Because the date follows the lunar calendar, it falls on a different day in the Gregorian calendar each year, usually in September or early October. Anyone hoping to attend should confirm the year's date in advance with the city's cultural property office.

Miyakojima rewards a longer stay. The Miyakojima City Museum sets the island's festivals, religion, and the weight of the poll-tax era in context, a useful visit before or after seeing the dance. The surrounding reefs and the long bridges linking the smaller islands of Irabu, Kurima, and Ikema make for easy day trips, and other communities across Miyako keep their own kuicha and harvest customs through the autumn.