Miyako Kuicha

A Circle Dance Built from Combined Voices

On the Miyako Islands, at the southwestern edge of Okinawa Prefecture and roughly 300 kilometers from the main island of Okinawa, communities still gather in open squares to sing and dance in a ring. The practice is called kuicha. People link into a circle outdoors, swing both arms forward and back and from side to side, stamp the ground, spring upward, and clap their hands between the movements. There is no stage and, by tradition, no instrument: the human voice carries everything.

The name is usually explained as a joining of kui, meaning voice, and chā, to bring together, though the etymology is not settled. Some communities today add the sanshin, the three-stringed Okinawan lute, but kuicha was long held to be a song-and-dance without any instrument at all. In February 2002 Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs placed it on the national register as a Selected Intangible Folk Cultural Property.

Why the State Chose to Record It

Japan protects its living folk traditions in tiers. The highest rank is the Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property. Below that sits a quieter category: a tradition the government formally selects as one "requiring measures such as documentation." For these, public funds support recording, preservation, and presentation rather than a full designation. People often shorten the name to Selected Intangible Folk Cultural Property, and that is the status kuicha holds, listed on 12 February 2002 under the heading of folk performing arts.

The appraisal rests on how tightly the dance is woven into ordinary life and belief. Kuicha is danced at the harvest festival and at rites praying for rain, and just as readily for pleasure on an evening with no occasion at all. The official assessment notes that it keeps something of the fundamental form of folk performing art, and that its song and movement have no clear parallel elsewhere.

The shape of the dance shifts with the community, the occasion, and the song. It may be performed by men only, by women only, by both together, or by the tsukasa alone, the women who lead a community's rituals. When men and women dance together, they sometimes form separate concentric rings, and sometimes split a single circle between them. Often the form is call and response: the men dance while the women clap and sing, then the roles reverse. One song flows straight into the next, and the ring holds for a long stretch.

The Dance of a Lifted Burden

The best known kuicha is the Harimizu no Kuicha, the dance of the abolished poll tax. For more than two centuries Miyako lived under a head tax levied on individuals, with whole villages held jointly responsible. Women were obliged to weave fine ramie cloth, the prized Miyako jōfu, to help meet the demand. In 1893 four farmer representatives sailed to Tokyo to petition the government for its end. Tradition holds that when they returned the following spring, people gathered from across the islands, spilling inland from the Harimizu shore, and welcomed them by dancing kuicha.

The songs themselves range widely: prayers for a good harvest, pleas for rain, declarations of love, and accounts of the joys and hardships of work. Written traces are old. A 1701 chronicle records that kuicha was danced before the Ryukyu king in 1655, and a traditional account places its beginnings in the unification of Miyako in the fourteenth century. What a visitor sees today is the unbroken end of that long line, still danced by the descendants of the people who first sang it.

Where to See It

Because kuicha is a living practice rather than a fixed monument, there is no building to visit and no fixed address to find. The surest chance to watch it is the Kuichaa Festival, held in Miyakojima City since 2002, launched around the centennial of the poll tax's end. Performers run from preschoolers to dancers in their nineties, and the program divides into two parts: traditional kuicha kept alive by community preservation groups, and newly composed pieces.

Year round, the Miyakojima City Museum in Hirara presents the islands' folk performing arts beside materials on the poll-tax abolition movement and the weaving of Miyako jōfu, the same cloth that once paid the tax. The museum opens from 9:00 to 16:30 and closes on Mondays; admission is 300 yen. Miyako is reached by air, with the airport and the port of Hirara serving as the island's gateways.