Onakama Customs of the Murayama Region

The Onakama Customs of the Murayama Region: Blind Mediums Who Carried Messages Between the Living and the Dead

In the central basin of Yamagata Prefecture, women who had lost their sight once made their living by speaking for the dead. They were known as Onakama. Their work centered on kuchiyose, a rite in which a deceased relative was called up to speak through the medium's own mouth, and extended to healing prayers and various forms of divination. The community of practitioners looked to a single religious center: the Iwaya Kannon, an eye-deity sanctuary in what is now the town of Nakayama. In December 1978 the national government placed this practice on its list of intangible folk customs to be documented, a category created for traditions considered important enough to record carefully before they disappear.

The Onakama were one branch of a wider northern Japanese tradition of blind female mediums. In Aomori the same kind of practitioner is called an Itako, in the old Sendai domain an Ogamisama, and in Fukushima a Mikosama. What set the Yamagata group apart was less their technique than the place they organized around, and the unusually complete record of objects they left behind.

Who the Onakama Were, and Why the Custom Was Recorded

An Onakama was almost always a girl who was blind or severely visually impaired from a young age. In a rural society with few options for such children, becoming a medium was a recognized path to a livelihood and a measure of social standing. Training began early. A would-be Onakama was apprenticed to a senior medium, learned ritual texts and chants by ear over several years, and then passed through an initiation in which she was understood to receive her tutelary deity. Only after that ordeal could she take on clients of her own.

Her services answered everyday needs. Farmers asked about the coming harvest or a sick animal. A widow wanted to hear, once more, from a husband lost in war or illness. Families consulted her before a marriage, a move, or a journey. The Onakama supplied a voice for grief and a framework for decisions in places where doctors and written records were scarce.

By the postwar decades the conditions that had sustained the custom were gone. Medical care reached the villages, schooling opened other doors to blind children, and the generation of working mediums grew old without successors. The 1978 selection was, in effect, an acknowledgment that the living practice was ending. A national survey followed, and its findings were published in 2006 as the sixth volume of a series on Japanese mediumship, devoted to the Tohoku region and Yamagata. No preservation body was designated, because there was no longer an active group to preserve.

The Tools of the Trade

Much of what is now known about the Onakama survives through the objects they used, and these are remarkably specific. The central implement was the Todosama, a personal sacred bundle that held the medium's tutelary deity and traveled with her throughout her career. It served a role close to the Odaiji carried by the Itako of Aomori, marking both her vocation and her spiritual authority.

Alongside it came a working kit. A catalpa bow, the azusa-yumi, was tapped or plucked to set up the rhythm that accompanied a summoning. A heavy rosary, the irataka-juzu, strung with materials such as boar tusks and old coins, was rubbed between the palms to produce a dry rattling sound during prayer. Divination called for bundles of yarrow-style sticks and counting blocks, and the medium also kept ritual swords and small mirrors. Each item had a defined function in a session, and together they map out a practice that was far more structured than the word "fortune-telling" suggests.

Iwaya Jubachiya Kannon: The Head Temple of the Onakama

The spiritual heart of the custom was the Iwaya Jubachiya Kannon, the Kannon hall of Nichigatsu-ji in Nakayama. Long revered as a deity of the eyes, the sanctuary drew worshippers from across the Murayama district and beyond, and the link between an eye-healing Kannon and a community of sightless mediums gave the place particular meaning for the Onakama, who regarded it as their head temple.

The hall's history is layered and partly legendary. Its founding is traced to the Asuka period, though that origin is not documented. A tradition holds that the worship hall was rebuilt in 807, while the structure standing today has been dated to the mid-Edo period; a ridge tablet records a reconstruction of the main sanctuary in 1826. About a kilometer to the southwest, near the summit of Mount Takamine, an inner sanctuary preserves a stone reliquary pagoda assigned to the Kamakura or Muromachi period, evidence that worship on the site is genuinely old.

The temple remains active. Its annual festival falls on August 18 and includes a fire-walking rite, in which participants cross a bed of embers to pray for health and protection through the coming year.

The 951-Object Collection

What makes the Onakama unusually well understood is a single, systematic collection. The objects connected with the cult of the Iwaya Jubachiya Kannon were gathered and catalogued, and in May 1984 the assemblage was designated an Important Tangible Folk Cultural Property under the name "Folk Belief Materials of the Iwaya Jubachiya Kannon." It comprises 951 items in all, with the town of Nakayama as its custodian.

The breakdown reads almost like an inventory of the practice itself: 37 Todosama bundles, 22 catalpa bows, 36 rosaries, 23 sets of divination sticks and counting blocks, 18 swords, seven ritual boxes, 205 mirrors, 72 votive plaques, 389 prayer tablets, a dozen gongs and bells, and roughly 130 further pieces. Some belonged to the mediums and some were offered by believers at the Kannon hall, so the collection documents both sides of the relationship at once. Together the objects allow the workings of a vanished folk religion to be reconstructed in concrete, physical terms rather than from memory alone.

The materials are now housed and displayed at the Nakayama Town Museum of History and Folklore, a short walk from the local station, which makes this one of the few places in Japan where the equipment of a regional medium tradition can be seen gathered in one room.

Visiting the Sites Today

There is no longer a living Onakama to consult, so a visit means encountering the custom through its objects and its setting. The natural starting point is the Nakayama Town Museum of History and Folklore, where the designated collection is shown alongside materials on river transport on the Mogami and on local farming life. Reaching the museum is straightforward: it stands about five minutes on foot from Uzen-Nagasaki Station on the JR Aterazawa Line, which branches from Yamagata Station, and parking is available for those arriving by car.

The Iwaya Kannon itself can be visited as a working temple, and the August 18 festival, with its fire-walking, is the liveliest time to see it. Nakayama is also known as the birthplace of imoni, the autumn taro-and-meat hot pot cooked in large kettles on the riverbanks of Yamagata, so a trip here can easily combine the region's folk religion with one of its best-loved seasonal foods.