Etchu Children's Dance

Etchū no Chigomai: Children's Court Dances of Toyama

On a wooden stage raised inside a shrine precinct, four boys in white face paint and brocade robes move through slow, deliberate figures while a single drum and flute mark the rhythm. Not one of them walked there on his own feet. Each was carried in on an adult's shoulders, because a child chosen to dance must not let his soles touch bare earth until the ritual is over.

This is Etchū no Chigomai, a set of child dances kept alive in three communities of Toyama Prefecture and designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property by Japan's national government on January 14, 1982. The name groups together the dances of the Kamo Shrine in Imizu, the Hōfuku-ji temple in Kurobe, and the Kumano Shrine in Toyama City. Three local preservation societies hold responsibility for passing them on: the Kamo Shrine Ritual Transmission Society, the Asahi Chigomai Preservation Society, and the Kumano Shrine Chigomai Preservation Society.

Court Dance That Became a Village Rite

Much of Japan's folk performing art began as something grander. Bugaku, the court dance of the imperial capital, spread into the provinces over centuries and settled into local hands, where it was reshaped to fit village shrines and temple ceremonies. Across the old provinces of Etchū and Echigo, on the Sea of Japan coast, that inherited court dance took a particular form: it was handed to children. The performer is a chigo, a boy of roughly eight to fourteen, and the surviving repertoire still carries the names of pieces danced at the Heian court more than a thousand years ago.

The defining custom is the prohibition on touching the ground. A chigo is treated as a vessel for the divine during the festival, so from the moment he is dressed until the last dance ends, he travels only on adult shoulders. The detail sounds small. In practice it shapes the whole event, turning the procession through the streets into part of the ritual rather than a way of getting from one place to another.

The three traditions are not identical. The order of pieces, the tempo, the age of the dancers, and the founding stories differ from place to place, and those differences are exactly what scholars value. Together they show how a single courtly art could root itself in three separate communities and grow in three directions.

The Three Stages

At the Kamo Shrine in Imizu, the dance is performed every September 4 during the autumn festival, on a stage in the shrine grounds. Locals call it Kattondo, a name borrowed from the sound of the festival drumming. Four boys aged about eleven or twelve dance nine pieces, among them Hoko no mai, Rinka, Konasori, Gako no mai, Ama no mai, Kochō no mai, Ōnasori, Ebisu no mai, and Bairo. Around half past noon the chigo are carried from the festival host's house through the village; the dancing begins on the stage at one o'clock. Tradition holds that this dance came from the Kamo-mioya Shrine, better known as Shimogamo, in Kyoto. Keeping nine separate pieces alive in one place is unusual, and it is part of why the Imizu dance is treated as a model example.

At Hōfuku-ji, a temple in the Asahi district of Kurobe, the dance belongs to the Kannon-e, a Buddhist observance for the bodhisattva Kannon. Four boys aged roughly ten to fourteen perform five pieces: Hoko no mai, Taiheiraku, Ringagaku, Manzairaku, and Senshūraku. The purification here is the strictest of the three. Practice begins about a week ahead, during which the boys eat no fish or meat, and they wear tall wooden clogs so their feet never meet the earth directly. A written record kept at the temple, the Chigomai Shōga Oboegaki, survives in a 1722 copy and shows the dance was already established before the middle of the Edo period. The temple grounds also hold a stone dance platform, which points to a connection with the bugaku lineage of Shitennō-ji in Osaka. The performance now falls on the third Sunday of April, having long been fixed to April 18, and it coincides with the blooming of the Akebi great cherry, a roughly four-hundred-year-old tree designated a prefectural natural monument.

At the Kumano Shrine in the Nakanomyō neighborhood of Toyama City, the dance is given on August 25 on a temporary stage before the worship hall. The dancers wear red, and they are young: two older boys of about nine and two younger ones of about eight, all from a local elementary school. Seven pieces survive, including the two-person Hoko no mai and Gako no mai and the four-person Rinka. The national designation describes this dance as having reached Nakanomyō from the Kamo Shrine tradition in the late sixteenth century. A local account gives a different origin, tracing the rite to the year 1704, when an epidemic struck the area and a village official named Wakabayashi Genzaemon, acting on a divine message, dedicated the dance; the sickness lifted and a good harvest followed. The repertoire closely mirrors the Imizu dance, which suggests the two communities were once in contact, though the Kumano version runs at a quicker tempo and handles certain pieces in its own way.

Why It Was Designated

When the Agency for Cultural Affairs grouped these three dances under a single designation, it was recognizing something that no one community could demonstrate alone. Each is a provincial offshoot of capital-style court dance, each preserves identifiable bugaku techniques, and each still observes the old taboo of carrying the dancer so his feet never touch the ground. Read side by side, they make a clear case study in how court performance migrated outward and survived as living village ritual.

The dances have continued because the communities decided they should. Boys are still chosen each year, parents still take on the work of preparation, and the preservation societies still teach the steps. That continuity, more than any single costume or melody, is what the designation protects.

Seeing the Dances

These are festival performances, not scheduled museum events, so the calendar matters. The Imizu dance falls on September 4, the Kurobe dance on the third Sunday of April, and the Toyama City dance on August 25. Dates and start times can shift, and in some years access has been limited, so it is worth confirming with the relevant town or city before planning a visit.

Each venue has its own appeal beyond the dance itself. The Kamo Shrine in Imizu traces its founding by tradition to 1066 and holds a busy ritual calendar through the year. Hōfuku-ji in Kurobe sits within reach of the Unazuki hot spring resort, and its old cherry tree draws visitors when the April dance takes place. The Kumano Shrine is most easily reached from Hayahoshi Station on the JR line, a short taxi ride away. For anyone interested in how Japan's classical court arts settled into rural life, the three stages of Etchū no Chigomai offer an unusually direct view.