Kohama Island's Performing Arts

Performing Arts of Kohama Island

On Kohama Island, a low sugar-cane island of roughly eight square kilometers in Okinawa's Yaeyama group, the year is still organized around three communal festivals at which residents perform dances, comic plays, and sung chants that survive nowhere else. The repertoire belongs to the Bon observances of the seventh lunar month, the Kitsugan-sai prayer-fulfillment festival of the eighth, and the Tanadui seed rites that follow in autumn. About 700 people live here, and they carry the tradition through a single preservation society and a precise division of ritual duties.

The richest of the three occasions is Kitsugan-sai, held to give thanks for the year's answered prayers and to ask for the next harvest. For its central day the island splits into a northern and a southern settlement, each fielding its own performers in what amounts to a friendly contest. In the north, a household called the Mirukuya keeps the mask of Miroku, the Buddhist figure of future blessing; in the south, the Fukurujuya keeps the mask of Fukurokuju, a god of fortune and long life. Around these two houses cluster the dancers, known as bunduri-ninzu, the kyogen comic players, the kyongin-ninzu, and the musicians of the ji, who supply the singing and the sanshin.

From a Record to a National Designation

These arts first entered the national register on 26 December 1995, when the Agency for Cultural Affairs designated them a Selected Intangible Folk Cultural Property, formally an intangible folk cultural property "requiring measures such as documentation." This category differs from the better-known Important designation. It marks traditions judged to need urgent recording because depopulation or social change threatens their survival, and it lets public funds support filming and written documentation rather than conferring the highest protected status.

That higher status came later. On 7 March 2007 the same body of arts was designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property, this time under the fuller name "Performing Arts of the Bon, Kitsugan-sai, and Tanadui Festivals of Kohama Island," a title that takes in all three ritual occasions rather than the festivals alone. The protecting body in both cases is the Kohama Folk Performing Arts Preservation Society. The national database record that anchors this article still carries the 1995 selection, so a visitor researching the island will meet both the older name, "Performing Arts of Kohama Island," and the expanded one of 2007.

What earned the recognition lies partly in the repertoire and partly in its setting. Several pieces are found only on Kohama, and all are performed inside a working religious framework rather than as a staged spectacle. The dances at Bon, for instance, hold an archaic form of the mainland Buddhist nenbutsu dance, reshaped over centuries into something unmistakably Okinawan.

What to Watch on the Main Day

Time a visit to the second day of Kitsugan-sai, called Shonichi, and you will see the one day the rites open to outside viewing. It unfolds at Kahone Utaki, a sacred grove at the island's center that is ordinarily closed even to residents. The morning begins with the zamari, a circling procession in which all the performers enter the sacred courtyard behind the Miroku and Fukurokuju masks. A lion-dance circuit and stick dances come next.

Only after the stick dancing does a stage appear, raised in front of the grove's place of worship: a wooden platform about 3.6 meters across and 4.5 meters deep, assembled on the spot in a matter of minutes. Then come more than twenty numbers, alternating between the two settlements. The Miroku and Fukurokuju entrances open the sequence, followed by the paired Shungin plays of north and south and a long run of dance and comedy. Two pieces belong to Kohama alone: the Bupiki, a dance that mimes the drawing of ramie fiber for the fine jofu cloth once woven across the Yaeyama Islands, and the Datuda, a figure in a high-nosed black mask who moves in a strange, deliberate way. No microphones or amplifiers are used, so you hear the sanshin, the singers, and the performers' breathing directly.

At Bon the mood is quieter. Groups called nimucha-ninzu move through the village, calling at every house and dancing spirit dances in the front gardens to two nenbutsu songs. The Tanadui rites, held later in the year, scatter shorter performances among the sacred groves, the homes of ritual officials, and the rice-farming households, with songs that bless the sprouting of the newly sown seed.

Around the Island

Kohama is small enough to circle by rented bicycle or scooter in an afternoon, though the road rolls up and down more than its size suggests. Its best-known view is from Ufudaki, the high point of the island at 99 meters, where an observation deck takes in the surrounding Yaeyama islands and, on a clear day, the long ridge of Iriomote and the outline of Ishigaki. Near the summit stands a hibanmui, one of the old fire-signal mounds of the Sakishima islands, now protected as a national historic site.

The straight farm road known locally as the Sugar Road, running through cane fields toward the sea, and the red-tiled house called Kohagura-so are both familiar to Japanese visitors as locations from the 2001 television drama Churasan. A small island museum displays photographs and objects from Kitsugan-sai and the harvest festival, a useful stop if your trip falls outside festival season.