F E S T I V A L ／ FEST-058
Ideura Shirifuri Matsuri (Buttock-Swinging Harvest Ritual)
井手浦 尻振り祭いでうら しりふりまつり
In the mountain hamlet of Ideura, at the southern end of Kitakyūshū City's Kokura Minami Ward, a harvest prediction ritual is performed each January 8th that has no precise parallel in Japan's festival catalogue. According to Kitakyūshū City's official documentation, the ceremony is said to have originated in the early Edo period (1600s) and derives from a local legend in which the tail of the Yamata no Orochi — the eight-headed serpent slain by the deity Susanoo-no-Mikoto — fell to earth at Ideura, and that those years in which the tail descended brought abundant harvests to sea, mountain, and river alike. In the ceremony, members of the local preservation society construct a large straw serpent approximately four metres long and thirty centimetres in diameter, to which a bow, arrows, and sacred paper streamers (hei) are attached. The priests and preservation society members then insert the serpent's head, body, and tail between their own buttocks, and at the priest's call of 'Sea! Mountain! River!' (Umi! Yama! Kawa!), sway their hips in unison. The greater the sway, the more abundant the anticipated harvest across all three domains. As a harvest prediction ritual of unusually direct physical embodiment, the Ideura ceremony has been identified by folklorists as a significant example of sympathetic agricultural magic in the Kyūshū mountain community tradition.
H I G H L I G H T S
Highlights
- 01The physical act of inserting a four-metre straw serpent armed with bow, arrows, and hei between one's own body and swaying to the priest's invocation of sea, mountain, and river constitutes a form of embodied sympathetic ritual — harvest prediction through physical mimicry — whose directness and bodily specificity are genuinely unusual in the Japanese ceremonial repertoire.
- 02The origin legend connecting the ceremony to the fallen tail of the Yamata no Orochi represents an example of local mythological topography: a cosmic event from the Kojiki-Nihonshoki mythological corpus is domesticated into a specific village landscape and made the foundation of an annual agricultural rite.
- 03The small scale and community-centred nature of the ceremony — performed at a community hall plaza in a mountain hamlet where population decline and ageing are advanced — make the Ideura ritual an important case study in the sociology of folk religious continuity in rural Japan.
D E E P D I V E