F E S T I V A L ／ FEST-068

Doronko Festival (Mud-Smearing Rite, Wakamiya Hachimangū)

どろんこ祭り（高知・若宮八幡宮）どろんこまつり

At Wakamiya Hachimangū shrine in the Nagahama district of Kōchi City on the Pacific coast of Shikoku, a spring festival with more than four hundred years of documented history takes place over three days beginning on the first Saturday of April each year. Counted among the three great eccentric festivals of Tosa Province, the Doronko Festival is grounded in a prayer for an abundant harvest and the health of the community through the agricultural year. Its ritual core is arresting in its specificity: women wearing yukata — summer cotton kimono — approach men and smear their faces with mud taken from the rice paddy. According to local tradition, a man whose face has been smeared with the sacred mud will not fall ill that summer. The gesture reverses the usual ceremonial roles of spring agricultural ritual, placing women as the active givers of agricultural blessing and men as its passive recipients. The origins of the festival are disputed: one tradition holds that it began during the tenure of the second Tosa domain lord, Yamauchi Tadayoshi, in the early Edo period; another traces it to the earlier era of the Chōsokabe clan during the Sengoku period. Over the three festival days, yukata-clad women carry the mud-smearing practice from the shrine's precincts outward through Nagahama, to Katsurahama beach, and into central Kōchi City, extending the agricultural blessing across the landscape.