F E S T I V A L ／ FEST-066

Warabi Hadaka Matsuri (Mud-and-Bare-Body Festival of Warabi)

和良比はだか祭り（どろんこ祭り）わらびはだかまつり（どろんこまつり）

Each year on February 25th — regardless of weather conditions — at the Musubi Shrine (Kōmusubi-jinja) and the ritual paddy field (shinden) within the adjacent Warabi-ga-Oka Park in Yotsukaido City, a three-part ceremony of agricultural prayer and community blessing is performed that brings together some of the most direct expressions of Japanese folk religious practice: bare-body ritual labour in cold mud, the application of ritual mud to infants, and a full-contact competition between participants. In the first section, men in white loincloths enter the flooded paddy field and perform rice-planting gestures as a prayer for abundant harvest — the oldest continuous act of agrarian prayer in the Japanese ceremonial calendar. In the second section, young children of approximately one year of age have mud from the sacred paddy applied to their foreheads by the bare-body participants, in a rite of protection against illness and prayer for healthy development that carries clear overtones of initiation-through-touch. In the third section, the bare-body participants form mounted pairs and engage in a full-contact cavalry battle (kibassen) while throwing mud at each other — and at the surrounding crowd. Yotsukaido City's official documentation presents the festival as the most representative folk ceremony of the city's calendar, and it has been transmitted as a community ritual of agricultural, protective, and communal significance since at least the early modern period.