Namahage

What it is

The Namahage belong to the New Year customs of the Oga Peninsula in Akita Prefecture, in northern Japan. Local men put on ogre masks and long capes of straw, carry a wooden pail and a knife that is only an imitation, and walk from house to house in twos and threes. In a heavy local accent they call out for crying children and for children who misbehave. The figures are understood as oni, ogres, yet they are also treated as welcome guests who bring good fortune for the coming year. Householders answer them, offer food and drink, and hear out the scolding.

Where it comes from

Older accounts describe the visitors as young men playing the part of kami who come at the turn of the year, a kind of toshigami, the deity of the year. Folklore offers several explanations for the Oga figures, and none is settled. One traces them to yamabushi, mountain ascetics of Shugendō, who prayed in village houses after training on Honzan and Shinzan. Another makes them messengers of a mountain kami, whose home villagers see in the peninsula because it resembles a mountain when viewed from the sea, and who is thought to watch over their lives. A third says a foreigner washed ashore and was taken for an ogre. The fourth tells of five bats that followed Emperor Wu of Han to Oga and became demons.

How it is done

The group goes from door to door, two or three at a time. A masked figure calls out the local challenge about crying children or naughty ones, and the household answers. Parents may have asked beforehand that a particular lesson be pressed home, and the visitors repeat it before leaving. The knife and the pail serve as emblems of the role. In the twentieth century the household gave rice cakes, and newly married couples were expected to receive the visitors in formal dress with sake and food. Nowadays cakes often pass the other way, to tourists.

Tools and materials

The mask is the centre of the outfit. Older ones were carved from wood, sometimes bark, and painted, mostly in red; in recent years cardboard, flattened metal cans and other salvaged material are built over a frame of bamboo strainers. One pair from the hamlet of Yumoto has a red face and a blue one. The straw garment has a standard name, mino, but locally it is kede, kende or kedashi. A deba knife, usually a wooden or papier-mâché imitation, and a teoke, a wooden hand pail, complete the dress.

What it is for

The visit is aimed at children. It is meant to push them toward obedience and good behaviour, and parents who know which neighbours are playing the parts can ask for a specific fault to be raised. The Namahage repeat the lesson as they leave. Beyond that, one strand of interpretation holds that the visitors are deities whose arrival benefits the household, while others see an agricultural custom in which kami descend from the sacred mountains. The legend of Emperor Wu gives the ogres a darker role: they are said to steal crops and young women until a wager defeats them.

Who does it

The performers are local men and youths of the peninsula, not a separate priesthood; no training or initiation is described. They take the parts for the season, and the families they visit usually know who is behind the mask. In the four legends the role is traced to mountain ascetics, to a messenger of the mountain kami, to a shipwrecked stranger, and to bats turned demons. Since 1964 the Namahage Sedo Festival at Shinzan Shrine has staged the visit for a wider public in February, which shifts the part toward performance for visitors.

Peoples and places

Oga in Akita Prefecture holds the best-known version, but related masked visits are recorded across Japan. On the Yaeyama Islands of Okinawa there is Akamata-Kuromata, a secretive parallel. Yamagata has Amahage, Ishikawa Amamehagi, Fukui Appossha, Ehime Amaburakosagi. Noshiro in Akita has Nagomehagi, and the former Yūwa, now part of Akita city, has Yamahage. Northern Iwate has Suneka, also called Anmo, Nagomi or Nagomihakuri, and the Koshikijima Islands of Kagoshima have Toshidon. The figures of Oga are the ones most widely recognised.

What people believe

The figures sit between ogre and god. Present-day understanding calls them a kind of oni, while the older layer of the custom has young men standing in for kami at the year's turning; the namahage are classed as toshigami, the god of the year. Two readings exist among specialists: that the visitors are deities from beyond the village whose coming benefits the household, and that they are kami coming down from the sacred mountains in an agricultural rite. The old talk of hearth blisters and peeling ties the custom to household fire and hard work.

When it is done

The visits currently happen on the last night of the Gregorian year. Earlier they came at Koshōgatsu, the Little New Year, the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, which lands near mid-February, about a fortnight after Chinese New Year. The Sedo Festival, started in 1964, keeps to the second weekend of February, close to that older date, and is held each year at Shinzan Shrine. The old lines about whetting a knife and boiling adzuki beans belong to this season, since azuki gruel was eaten at the Little New Year.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Folklorists and ethnologists have argued over what the visit means, without settling it. Some read it as a belief in deities who arrive from elsewhere and whose coming benefits the household, others as an agricultural custom in which kami descend from the sacred mountains. The name has drawn attention too: namomi is the heat blister, hidako, that comes from long hours at the irori hearth, and the peeling of that fire rash is the derivation most often proposed. Twentieth-century field descriptions record rice cakes, sake and the formal dress expected of newlyweds.

Compare and confuse

Comparisons in the literature reach well outside Japan: Black Peter in the Netherlands, Krampus in parts of Europe, the Busójárás, the Kukeri, Kurentovanje in Slovenia, Latvian masked processions, and the Ogoh-ogoh of Bali. Within Japan the nearest relatives are the masked visits listed above, and Setsubun, when roasted soybeans are thrown to drive off ogres, along with Tsuina, an older ogre-warding practice that came from China.

Today

The custom continues on the peninsula, and the Sedo Festival has run at Shinzan Shrine since 1964. At that event the direction of gift-giving has flipped: the Namahage hand rice cakes to tourists rather than collecting them from households. The masks themselves have changed with the materials at hand, from carved and painted wood or bark to cardboard, flattened cans and other salvaged stuff over bamboo strainer frames. The Oga version is the one most widely recognised, and it stands as an example of a local practice opened to outside visitors.

Questions people ask about Namahage

Good reading and sources

• Namahage on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data