F E S T I V A L ／ FEST-097

Kurokawa Nō Ōgi Festival

黒川能 王祇祭くろかわのう おうぎさい

In the Kurokawa district of Tsuruoka City in Yamagata Prefecture — a farming village of approximately 240 parishioner households, organized since the early modern period into two performing groups called the Upper Seat (Kamiza) and the Lower Seat (Shimoza) — the Kasuga Shrine's annual Ōgi Festival on the first and second of February constitutes one of the most exceptional survivals in the history of Japanese performing arts. For more than five hundred years, the parishioners of Kurokawa Kasuga Shrine have performed nō and kyōgen within a religious framework that has preserved ceremonial forms, masks, costumes, and staging conventions that predate the standardization of nō into its current five-school system (Kanze, Hōshō, Kongō, Komparu, Kita). The performers are not professional actors but ordinary villagers who inherit their roles through the parishioner system; the nō is classified not as art for performance but as an act of religious offering to the shrine's deity. In the words preserved in local tradition: 'The spirit of Kurokawa Nō is not in the nō but in the festival.' Designated a National Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property in 1976 (Shōwa 51). The festival involves two nights of continuous performance: the Tōya (host household) of each seat conducts the ceremonies at the household and at the shrine, with selected plays performed through the night before an audience of parishioners and, to the extent permitted, outside observers.