F E S T I V A L ／ FEST-083
Kawarayu Onsen Hot-Water Pouring Festival (Yukake Matsuri)
川原湯温泉 湯かけ祭りかわらゆおんせん ゆかけまつり
At Kawarayu Onsen — a hot-spring resort in the Agatsuma River valley of western Gunma Prefecture, a community that was physically relocated in its entirety during the 2010s to make way for the Yamba Dam, and rebuilt on higher ground — a festival is held every year on the morning of January 20th, beginning at approximately 5:00 AM, that is among the most physically demanding devotional ceremonies in the Japanese calendar. Young men wearing only fundoshi loincloths divide into two groups and, in the predawn darkness and cold of deep winter, ladle hot spring water over one another from wooden buckets with intense vigor. According to local tradition, the ceremony is said to be about four hundred years old, and derives from a legendary event in which the spring at Kawarayu temporarily ran dry; unable to obtain the large rooster required for a propitiatory offering, the villagers imitated the cock's crow and shouted "It's a celebration!" — and in the midst of the argument and commotion, the spring returned. The ceremony thus re-enacts the quarrel-as-prayer, the vocal celebration-cry, and the thanksgiving to the deity of the spring, through a vigorous hot-water battle in the winter darkness. The festival also incorporates cock-crow mimicry, rice-cake pounding, and a mikoshi procession. Its continuation at the newly relocated Kawarayu Onsen — after the community's forced displacement by a major public infrastructure project — has been widely noted as an act of cultural resilience and community identity maintenance.
H I G H L I G H T S
Highlights
- 01Young men in loincloths ladling hot spring water over one another in the predawn darkness of January 20th — the steam rising from the combatants in a snowbound mountain valley at 5:00 AM — constitutes a visual scene of unusual physical and atmospheric intensity that is entirely specific to the thermal geography and winter climate of the Agatsuma River valley.
- 02The festival's origin legend — the community's cock-crow imitation and celebratory shouting that caused the dried spring to return — gives the vigorous hot-water battle a narrative logic that fuses prayer, communal noise-making, and thanksgiving into a single ceremonial act: the argument that brought the water back, re-enacted every year.
- 03Kawarayu Onsen's physical relocation in the 2010s to accommodate the Yamba Dam — the community rebuilt on higher ground above the reservoir — and the uninterrupted continuation of the Yukake Festival in the new location make the ceremony a contemporary instance of a community's active maintenance of ceremonial identity through a profound disruption of place.
D E E P D I V E