F E S T I V A L ／ FEST-080
Akusekijima no Boze (Visitation Deity Ceremony, Akuseki Island)
悪石島のボゼあくせきじまのぼぜ
On the sixteenth day of the seventh lunar month — the closing night of the Obon season, when the souls of the dead return to the other world — a visitation deity ceremony of remarkable visual character takes place on the tiny island of Akuseki-jima in the Tokara archipelago, administered by Toshima Village, Kagoshima Prefecture. Akuseki-jima lies approximately eleven hours by ferry south of Kagoshima Port; the island's permanent population numbers in the tens. In this remote setting, a young man of the community wraps his body entirely in the leaves of the birou (Livistona chinensis, a fan palm native to southern Japan and the Ryūkyū Islands), covers his face, mask, and arms with red clay and soot, and takes up a long staff called the Boze-mara. He then appears without warning in the circle of the Obon bon-odori folk dance, striking or touching the islanders and any observers present with the staff. According to island tradition, being touched by the Boze drives away the accumulated spiritual pollution and the calamities of the passing year. The Akusekijima no Boze is designated one of the ten constituent elements of the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage listing "Raiho-shin: Ritual Visits of Deities in Masks and Costumes" (2018). The birou-leaf costume and the ceremony's integration with the Obon bon-odori are characteristic of a southern island devotional culture that scholars have linked to the fusion of mainland Obon practice and the ancestral spirit traditions of the Ryūkyū Islands.
H I G H L I G H T S
Highlights
- 01The Boze's appearance — a figure covered from head to foot in birou (fan palm) leaves, face and mask daubed in red clay and soot, a long staff raised — erupting without warning into the circle of the Obon bon-odori is one of the most visually striking moments in Japan's visitation deity ceremonial tradition, combining the festive and the numinous in a single sudden irruption.
- 02The ceremony's setting — the closing night of Obon on a tiny remote island eleven hours from Kagoshima — gives it an intensity of geographic and temporal specificity that large-scale mainland ceremonies cannot replicate; to witness the Boze is by necessity to spend several days on the island and to participate in its community life.
- 03The Akusekijima no Boze's inscription as one of the ten elements of the 2018 UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage listing "Raiho-shin: Ritual Visits of Deities in Masks and Costumes" places it in formal international relationship with the Oga Namahage, the Yoshihama no Suneka, the Noto Amamehagi, and Miyako Island's Paantū — a geographically distributed assembly of visitation deity ceremonies acknowledged as collectively representative of a uniquely Japanese form of ritual encounter with the numinous.
D E E P D I V E