F E S T I V A L ／ FEST-004

Konomiya Hadaka Matsuri (Naked Men Festival — Naoi Shinto Rite)

国府宮はだか祭（儺追神事）こうのみやはだかまつり なおいしんじ

Since the year 767 CE, the Naoi Shinto rite at Konomiya has been performed without interruption — 1,250-plus years of an annual ceremony in which thousands of men strip to a white fundoshi loincloth and converge on a single individual whose touch they believe will absorb their accumulated bad fortune. The Shin-otoko ("divine man"), selected each year, is the ceremony's passive fulcrum: he must accept the press of thousands of bodies, must endure the ritual contact of the multitude seeking to transfer their misfortune into him, and will spend the night in a state of ritual seclusion to contain what he has absorbed. The approach procession involves men from across the Owari region — typically concentrated in the unlucky ages of 25 and 42 — surging in waves through the shrine complex, their collective motion creating a human density that first-time observers consistently describe as physically overwhelming. The additional offering of a roughly four-ton decorated rice cake and the following morning's distribution of pieces of it to supplicants frames the ceremony's double logic: purification transferred into the divine man, blessing distributed through the rice.