Tokuyama Bon Dance

A Mountain Bon Dance Held Only on August 15

On the evening of August 15, in a village deep in the southern foothills of the Akaishi Mountains, a wooden stage measuring two ken square (roughly 3.6 meters on a side) is set up in the precincts of Asama Shrine in Tokuyama, Kawanehon Town. A procession winds toward it from the tōya, the host household where a purificatory dance has just been performed, and three very different things follow in turn on the stage and around it.

Boys in long-horned deer headdresses leap and stamp with red-and-white batons. Girls in cotton yukata with the long trailing obi associated with Kyoto maiko sing and step through slow lyric pieces that always end on the syllables "hi-yai." Between these, adult men perform fragments of kyōgen plays whose oldest surviving script is dated the fourth month of the ninth year of Hōreki (1759).

This is Tokuyama no Bon Odori, designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property of Japan in December 1987 and inscribed by UNESCO in November 2022 as part of the wider Furyū-odori group of forty-one Japanese ritual dances.

Three Performances Woven Together

The full evening is built from three distinct elements that alternate on and around the same compact stage.

Shikan-mai (the deer dance) opens and punctuates the sequence. A male deer with long antlers leads, two female deer follow, and a figure wearing the comic Hyottoko mask brings up the rear. To brisk hayashi music the dancers spin a red-and-white baton in each hand, hopping forward and back as if the deer themselves were on the move. Local tradition says the dance once warded off animals that raided the crops; it has long since been absorbed into the festival as the protective frame around the more delicate central performance. Until recent decades it was danced by men who had turned twenty that year. Today the role falls to junior high school boys.

Hi-yai is the lyric heart of the evening. Girls of elementary and junior high school age, dressed in hemp-leaf-pattern yukata with the satin-weave obi worn long and trailing, dance ko-uta (short courtly songs) accompanied by fans or by the same red-and-white batons used in the deer dance. The name comes from the refrain "hi-yai" that closes each verse. Surviving pieces include Kami Suzushime, Ōka (Cherry Blossom), Botan (Peony), and the unexpected Kabocha (Pumpkin). Until the early twentieth century these parts were taken by young men in female dress, which was the original convention of the earliest kabuki-style dance traditions.

Kyōgen, the comic narrative form, occupies the third position. A village script written in the fourth year of Keiō (1868) opens with the line that the plays have been taught since long ago "from mouth to ear, as a kind of sarugaku." An older script catalogues fourteen plays, of which only Raikō and Shin Soga are still actively performed. Adult men of the preservation society take these roles.

The ordering matters: Hi-yai and kyōgen alternate on the stage, and the deer dance is performed around its edges between turns. The cumulative effect is a single, hours-long sequence rather than three separate shows.

Why It Was Designated

The case for national protection rests on the way the parts fit together. Alternating ko-uta dance with kyōgen plays is the basic shape of the very early kabuki-odori that arose in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the period when Izumo no Okuni's troupe was performing in Kyoto. That form vanished almost everywhere in Japan as kabuki professionalised and moved indoors, leaving the village festival traditions to drift in other directions. Tokuyama is one of a small number of places where the alternating structure survived, and the addition of the animal-mask deer dance gives it a distinctly local character.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the festival as a transmission that preserves the appearance of early modern ko-kabuki-odori in its overall composition, and which is also rich in regional features through the addition of the animal-costume furyū dance. That combination of historical importance and local distinctiveness underpinned the 1987 designation.

Thirty-five years later, in November 2022, the festival was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity as one component of Furyū-odori, an umbrella nomination of forty-one ritual dances from twenty-four prefectures. Tokuyama no Bon Odori is the only such tradition from Shizuoka included in the listing.

The Setting: Asama Shrine and the Mountains Around It

The shrine itself enshrines Konohana no Sakuya-bime together with Ōnamuchi and Hondawake. The main hall was built in 1828 and the worship hall was rebuilt in 1937. Two enormous cedars, known as the Torii-sugi or Meoto-sugi (the "married couple cedars"), stand at the front of the precinct and are said to be around six hundred years old, planted in thanks for a recovery from illness.

The compact dance hall in the precinct is the focal point of the festival. From the stone retaining wall in front of the worship hall, which sits a step higher, audiences look down onto the performance. On a clear August night the lantern light, the heavy summer air of the river valley, and the percussion of the deer-dance hayashi create an atmosphere quite unlike anything found at urban bon dances.

The wider village holds an unusual concentration of cultural properties for its size, and the festival shares the calendar with the area's other major folk performance tradition. Visitors who come early can sometimes try on the deer headdress for a photograph before the evening's proceedings begin.

Planning a Visit

The festival is held every year on the night of August 15. Programmes change slightly from year to year but the full sequence runs several hours, with the deer dance making four passes (numbered first, fifth, tenth and fourteenth in a typical year's order of sixteen items).

Tokuyama sits in the upper reaches of the Ōi River valley. The nearest station is Suruga-Tokuyama on the Ōigawa Railway Main Line, about a ten-minute walk from the shrine. Travellers should note that the section of the Ōigawa Railway between Kawane-Onsen-Sasamado and Senzu has been suspended since damage from a 2022 typhoon; the town has been operating substitute buses while reconstruction is under way, so checking the latest rail and bus situation before travelling is essential. Driving via National Route 362 and Prefectural Route 77 takes about sixty minutes from the coastal plain.

Photography from designated viewing positions is generally permitted, but the event remains a Shinto offering rather than a tourist spectacle. Quiet attention, modest behaviour around the shrine grounds, and respect for the children performing are the basic courtesies.