F E S T I V A L ／ FEST-023

Nabekaburi Festival (Pot-on-Head Festival)

鍋冠祭（なべかぶりまつり）なべかぶりまつり

Somewhere in the rural reaches of Shiga Prefecture, men arrive at a shrine with ceramic cooking pots balanced on their heads, proceed to conduct their prayers and offerings in this configuration, and then go home. The Nabekaburi Matsuri is the kind of small-scale folk ceremony that exists at the absolute margins of Japan's ritual documentation — too local for national media coverage, too consistent to be called an anomaly — and its logic, while peculiar to outside eyes, sits within a recognizable tradition of Japanese apotropaic (evil-repelling) practice in which physical objects placed on or around the head intercept malicious influences. The pot receives what the head should not. Whether this makes practical sense matters less than the fact that it has been enacted with apparent sincerity for a very long time by people who found it useful.