"The Aomori Nebuta Matsuri" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Occult Japan: Shinto, Shamanism, and the Way of the Gods"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
August 3
The Aomori Nebuta Matsuri
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to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.)
Picture
a warrior forty feet tall, muscles lit from within, sword raised against a
demon twice his size, floating down a city street on the shoulders of thirty
sweating men while ten thousand dancers scream “Rasserā!” and hurl their bodies
into the night air around him. Now set that same warrior on fire—not literally,
not yet, but close: every year, when the final night of Japan's Aomori Nebuta
Matsuri ends, the whole glowing procession is loaded onto barges and sent out
onto the black water of Mutsu Bay, fireworks exploding overhead, before the
floats are quietly destroyed.
It's
one of the loudest, most photographed festivals in Japan, and also one of the
most argued-over. Ask why it exists at all and you'll get at least three
different answers—a war hero's clever trick, a conquered general's unquiet
grave, and a far older ritual for driving drowsiness itself out of the body—and
only one of them holds up to scrutiny…
The Festival of a Noble Warrior
In
the early 9th century, the shōgun Sakanoue no Tamuramaro was sent north to
subdue the Emishi, the
indigenous people of Tōhoku, and supposedly used enormous illuminated lanterns
and the sound of flutes and taiko drums to lure curious enemy soldiers out of
hiding before capturing them. The festival's original grand prize, created in
1962, was even named the Tamuramaro Shō in his honor. It's a great
origin story for a parade built entirely around giant lit-up figures.
However,
Tamuramaro's documented campaigns never actually reached what is now Aomori
Prefecture; his forces got as far as present-day Morioka, a considerable
distance to the south. The prize named after him was quietly renamed the Nebuta
Taishō in 1995, in no small part because, as locals candidly put it,
Tamuramaro is remembered in Tōhoku less as a hero than as a southern conqueror
who crushed the region's own people.
Which brings in the second legend … and it's a considerably darker one. This version traces “Nebuta” to Aterui, the actual Emishi general who fought Tamuramaro's forces for over a decade before his defeat, capture, and execution. According to this folk etymology, Aterui's surviving followers were forced to dig their own mass graves and were buried alive, the dirt stomped down over them by those who'd surrendered—an act the story links directly to the kanji sometimes used to write “Nebuta,” said to mean sending the dead back to their roots beneath a covering of earth. It's a piece of local memory that deserves to be taken seriously as memory, even where the etymology itself doesn't hold up under linguistic scrutiny; Aterui's real historical defeat and execution are well documented, but the specific burial story and its claimed connection to the word “Nebuta” isn't something linguists or historians treat as an established derivation. What it clearly is, is a community's way of refusing to let a war hero's parade forget who that war was actually fought against.
The
explanation most folklorists and festival historians actually favor is far less
dramatic than either war story, and far older. “Nebuta” almost certainly
descends from nemuri-nagashi, “sleep-flushing” or “sleep-driving away,”
a purification rite once practiced across wide stretches of Japan to physically
banish the drowsiness and lethargy that settled over farming communities during
the exhausting heat of midsummer. Regional dialects preserve the rite's
fingerprints everywhere: nenburi-nagashi in Tōhoku, nebuchi-nagashi
and neboke-nagashi in the Kantō region, all variations on the same idea
of “washing sleep away.”
That
rite fused, sometime before the Edo period, with two other traditions: the
Tanabata star festival imported from China, whose lantern-floating customs gave
Nebuta its name and its dramatic final-night sea procession, and toro-nagashi,
the older Buddhist practice of floating lanterns to guide ancestral spirits
back to the world of the dead. Put those pieces together and the festival's
actual DNA comes into focus: a midsummer purification ritual, aimed at
physically expelling exhaustion, spiritual impurity, and misfortune from both
body and village, wrapped in the imagery of ancestor-veneration and set alight
for one glorious week before being consigned to the water. The warriors and
demons riding atop the modern floats are a relatively late addition, an
Edo-period embellishment layered onto something considerably older and
considerably more intimate: villagers walking to the riverbank or the
shoreline, setting their own accumulated sleep and sickness adrift, and
watching it disappear downstream.
Regardless, origin myths tend to survive precisely because they're doing real cultural work even when they're historically shaky—Tamuramaro's flute-trick flatters a shōgun the region has genuine reason to resent, while the Aterui story insists on remembering exactly what that conquest cost. The truth underneath both of them turns out to be quieter and, in its own way, stranger still: a whole city, once a year, setting its collective exhaustion on fire and pushing it out to sea.
The
Aomori Prefecture carries this kind of unfinished business with the spirit
world well beyond a single August festival. Roughly ninety minutes from the
city, the volcanic wasteland of Mount Osorezan has been known for centuries as
one of the most direct gateways to the land of the dead in all of Japanese folk
religion, its sulfur-blasted terrain and Sanzu River crossing point mapped
almost literally onto Buddhist visions of the afterlife. To this day, itako,
blind female mediums trained through years of ascetic apprenticeship, gather
there each summer to channel the recently deceased for grieving visitors.
Nebuta and Osorezan are entirely separate traditions with no documented
historical connection to one another. But it's hard not to notice that the same
prefecture that spends one week each August ritually flushing sleep, sickness,
and misfortune out to sea has, for centuries, also kept open one of the
country's most trafficked doors to whatever lies on the other side of it.
OCCULT READS PRESENTS:
DAILY OCCULT REVIEW
Modern Occultist is proud to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the trance states, purification rites, and possession cults running underneath Japan's summer festival season, we turn to a genuinely strange piece of nineteenth-century field research.
Occult Japan: Shinto,
Shamanism, and the Way of the Gods
By
Percival Lowell | Inner Traditions
Long
before he became famous for his (thoroughly discredited) claims to have
observed canals on Mars, Percival Lowell spent the early 1890s traveling
through Japan, and what he witnessed there produced one of the strangest
travelogues in the Western occult canon. Occult Japan, first published in 1894
and kept in print by Inner Traditions ever since, is Lowell's firsthand account
of climbing Mount Ontake alongside pilgrim confraternities, watching mediums
walk barefoot across beds of burning coals, and observing shrine priests fall
into full possession trances, speaking in the voice of the kami said to have
entered them. Lowell approaches all of it as a trained astronomer and rigorous
empiricist would: methodically, skeptically, and, remarkably for a Western
visitor of his era, without ever quite managing to fully explain it away.
The
book's real value lies in its structure, which moves deliberately from the
spectacular to the theoretical. The opening chapters are pure ethnographic
reportage: the Ontake pilgrim clubs, the ritual objects called gohei, the
sacred precincts at Ise, all rendered in dense, immersive Victorian prose. But
Lowell doesn't stop at description. The book's back half pivots into a
genuinely ambitious, if dated, theory of Japanese selfhood and possession,
arguing that what Western observers dismissed as primitive superstition was in
fact a coherent psychological system, one in which the boundaries of individual
identity were simply drawn differently than in the West, porous enough to let a
god walk in. Modern readers will wince at some of Lowell's period-typical generalizations
about “the Japanese character,” and his framework is very much a product of
1890s comparative anthropology rather than contemporary religious studies. But
his actual observational material, gathered firsthand and corroborated by later
scholarship on Ontake-kō pilgrimage and Shinto possession trance, remains
genuinely valuable.
This
is not a beginner's guide to Shinto, and readers wanting a gentler overview of
kami worship and shrine practice should look elsewhere first. But for readers
of this magazine specifically curious about the documented history of trance
possession and ritual purification running underneath Japan's more famous
seasonal festivals, Occult Japan offers something rare: an eyewitness account,
sober and skeptical by design, of a spiritual technology the observer himself
couldn't quite dismiss.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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