Hagino and Nitayama Deer Dance

Hagino-Nitayama Shishi Odori: A Serow Dance from Northern Yamagata

On the afternoon of August 26 each year, seven dancers move into the precincts of Tozawa Shrine inside the ruins of Shinjo Castle. Each wears a long cloth that falls from the crown of the head to the ankles, and on the dancer's head sits a carved animal mask. The animal is not a deer. It is the kamoshika, the Japanese serow, a stocky goat-antelope of the northern mountains. A serow as the central figure of a shishi dance is unusual in Japan, where most such dances take the deer as their model, and it is the first thing local people will point out about the Hagino and Nitayama troupes.

The full name, Hagino-Nitayama Shishi Odori, covers two closely related dances kept alive in the Hagino and Nitayama districts in the north of Shinjo City. Both use the same seven-dancer form and the same songs. The word shishi odori is often translated as "deer dance," and the dance is sometimes written with the characters for lion-dance as well, but the figure these performers embody is the serow that still ranges through the surrounding hills.

How the Dance Is Built

Seven dancers, each standing alone rather than sharing a costume, make up the core. The lead is the naka-jishi, the center serow, flanked by the kachi-jishi (the winning serow) and the make-jishi (the losing serow). The remaining four carry names tied to their positions in the group. Every dancer drapes a bag-shaped curtain over the body, straps a small drum called a kakko against the stomach, and wears leggings and straw sandals beneath. The drum is struck as they dance, so the rhythm rises from the dancers themselves rather than from a separate ensemble.

Two singers stand to the side. They wear a rounded manju-gasa hat with cloth hanging from the brim and a loose, untied kimono. In their hands are sasara, instruments made from thick split bamboo that they scrape together to mark time while they sing. The melodies follow the cadence of goeika, the chanted hymns of Buddhist pilgrims, which gives the music a slow, devotional quality quite different from the brisk festival flute and drum heard elsewhere in Shinjo.

The performance unfolds through a set sequence of named pieces: niwairi (the entrance into the dancing ground, also called Mariko), tachi-mairi, kurui, nagekusa, and hikiniwa. The kurui, sometimes called the "frenzy on Mount Ogura," is the high point. Here the seven serows weave around and against one another in a tangle of heads and curtains. Stand close and you notice that the dance is not all force; the footwork is measured, and the long cloths trace shapes in the air as the dancers turn.

What the Designations Recognize

Yamagata Prefecture designated the Hagino-Nitayama Shishi Odori an Intangible Folk Cultural Property on September 30, 1966. Ten years later, on December 25, 1976, the national government added it to the list of Intangible Folk Cultural Properties for which documentation measures should be taken, a category of works selected for recording because of their value. These are two separate honors, and it is worth being clear about them: the dance holds a prefectural designation and a national selection for documentation. It is not, in its own right, a nationally designated Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property.

A point of confusion is worth heading off. The Shinjo Festival, during which the Hagino troupe performs, was inscribed on the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2016 as part of the float-procession festivals of Japan. That recognition belongs to the festival's yatai floats and their procession. The serow dance shares the same days but stands on its own footing.

What the records value is continuity. The songs, the seven-figure formation, and the serow masks have been passed from one generation of villagers to the next without becoming a staged spectacle for outsiders. The dance was once performed at weddings and coming-of-age celebrations within the community, and that domestic origin still shows in its unhurried, inward character.

From Daimyo Patronage to Village Persistence

The origins are not firmly documented, but the dance already had something like its present shape by the late sixteenth century. When the warlord Mogami Yoshiaki gathered the serow dances of his domain to perform, a record notes that he judged the long-curtain version the finest. In Mogami's territory only the Shinjo-area troupes used the long curtain, which places the dance at roughly four centuries old.

After the Mogami house lost the domain, the Tozawa clan took over Shinjo. The second Tozawa lord summoned the region's serow dancers to his villa to pray for a good harvest and the safety of the domain, an event called the shishi no niwairi. Village headmen led their troupes in, and the groups competed before the lord. A troupe that danced well might be asked to perform a second time, a high honor, and the Hagino dancers, by local account, were asked again and again.

The patronage ended with the Meiji period. The villa gatherings stopped, the rice allowance once granted to dancers for their obligatory practice was discontinued, and the dance faded in many villages. In the summer of 1880, when the former lord returned to visit family graves and asked to see the dance, only the Hagino and Kanazawa troupes still came. According to a passed-down account, the lord told a former headman that this was his family's dance and asked that it never be lost. Kanazawa eventually stopped; Hagino kept dancing, and by the 1890s a renewed troupe had formed under dedicated local teachers.

One legend explains why the troupes differ in number. A herd of seven serows, led by a parent, is said to have danced its way across this country toward the Shonai coast, and somewhere near Umegasaki it lost one of its members and went on as six. For that reason, the story goes, the Kanazawa dancers performed with six serows while Hagino kept all seven.

Seeing It, and What Else Is Nearby

The Hagino dance is dedicated on August 26, the final day of the Shinjo Festival, at Tozawa Shrine and the neighboring Gokoku Shrine in Mogami Park, the grounds of the former Shinjo Castle. The Nitayama troupe dances separately, on August 15, in the precincts of the Nitayama Jizo Hall. Outside these fixed dates the dance appears only occasionally, so a visit is best planned around mid-to-late August.

Mogami Park sits a short walk from Shinjo Station, a stop on the Yamagata Shinkansen, which makes the festival reachable as a day trip from Yamagata City or even Tokyo. The park itself, with its moats and cherry trees, is pleasant in any season. Within walking distance, the Shinjo Furusato History Center holds materials on the festival and its famous floats, a useful stop if you want to understand the larger event around the dance. If you come for the August festival, the three days also bring the towering yatai floats through the streets at night, lit and crowded, a contrast to the slow serow dance performed by daylight at the shrine.