Japan’s ‘naked men’ festival succumbs to population ageing

AFP | Oshu                                                         

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

A steam of sweat rose as hundreds of naked men tussled over a bag of wooden talismans, performing a dramatic end to a thousand-year-old ritual in Japan that took place for the last time.

Their passionate chants of “jasso, joyasa” (meaning “evil, be gone”) echoed through a ceder forest of the northern Japan’s Iwate region, where the secluded Kokuseki Temple has decided to end the popular annual rite.

Organising the event, which draws hundreds of participants and thousands of tourists every year, has become a heavy burden for the ageing local faithful, who find it hard to keep up with the rigours of the ritual.

The “Sominsai” festival, regarded as one of the strangest festivals in Japan, is the latest tradition impacted by the country’s ageing population crisis that has hit rural communities hard. “It is very difficult to organise a festival of this scale,” said Daigo Fujinami, a resident monk of the temple that opened in 729.

“ You can see what happened today --so many people are here and it’s all exciting. But behind the scenes, there are many rituals and so much work that have to be done,” he said. “I cannot be blind to the difficult reality.

Ageing population Japan’s society has aged more rapidly than most other countries’. The trend has forced countless schools, shops and services to close, particularly in small or rural communities. Kokuseki Temple’s Sominsai festival used to take place from the seventh day of Lunar New Year through to the following morning.

But during the Covid pandemic, it was scaled down to prayer ceremonies and smaller rituals. The final festival was a shortened version, ending around 11:00 pm, but it drew the biggest crowd in recent memory, local residents said.

As the sun set, men in white loincloths came to the mountainous temple, bathed in a creek and marched around temple’s ground. They clenched their fists against the chill of a winter breeze, all the while chanting “jasso joyasa”.

Some held small cameras to record their experience, while dozens of television crews followed the men through the temple’s stone steps and dirt pathways. As the festival reached its climax, hundreds of men packed inside the wooden temple shouting, chanting and aggressively jostling over a bag of talismans.