Yoshihiro Ishida
K uwanaIshitori Festival
The name of this festival originates from people looking at stones as deities. During
the festival, clean stones are taken from the Machiya River, which flows through thesouthern part of Kuwana City, and presented as offerings at the Kasuga Shrine, thelocal Shinto deity. Although Kasuga Shrine is the shrine of the Fujiwara family with
the Kasuga Grand Shrine located in Nara serving as the main shrine, its deity wastransferred to Kuwana Shrine, the guardian deity of Kuwana. This is an interesting
aspect regarding shrines in Japan, that any shrine in Japan easily transfers many
famous deities to their local shrine.
When looking at festivals, I see that Japanese people’s faith is polytheistic. In otherwords, I feel that Japanese are an ethnic group with a “hodgepodge” culture that accept
anything and everything without any rules.
Let’s look at the city of Kuwana. It is a very unique and powerful place.
Geographically speaking, it is the location where the Kiso Three Rivers, Japan’s
longest rivers meet, and is located right at that mouth of Ise Bay. Since ancient times,
Kuwana has flourished as an important port town that divides the Japanese archipelago
into east and west. Looking at Japanese history, we see that Kuwana appears in theNihon Shoki(The Chronicles of Japan) under writings about the powerful
KuwanaObitoclan. During the Edo period, Kuwana prospered in the lodging businessas the 42nd station among the 53 Stations of the Tokaido, and served as a center forsupporters of the shogun at the end of the Edo period. Incidentally, since the Meiji
government did not allow feudal domains formed by supporters of the shogun to use
their prefectural capital names as names for those prefectures, when listening toprefectural capital names it is easy to find out which regions were loyal to the emperor
and which were in support of the shogun. In accordance with this, the capital of Mie
prefecture is Tsu City.
Festivals are part of the history of the area. Indeed, I am deeply interested in theIshitori Festival from which I can find out about the Kuwana area and its multilayered
history.
In this festival, the 37 festival floats are called saisha. The mass media refers to all
festival floats as dashi. Although I think the name dashiprobably was the result of aneffort by the Meiji government aimed to standardize words throughout the country, I
feel that the unique names given to festival floats by local regions should be respected.
Now I will change gears and talk about mountains. After death, the bodies of ourancestors would be buried in the mountains of our hometowns. Mountains werelocations where the spirits of our ancestors would rest in peace. The spirits of ourancestors come down to the trees. Therefore, for festivals we build tall structures
which are high like mountains, stand up trees, and pull floats through our hometown
areas to possibly “meet” with our ancestors. This explains why those structures aregenerally referred to asyama(mountains).
An overwhelming feature of the Ishitori Festival of Kuwana is its musicalaccompaniment. Following its label as the “loudest festival in Japan,” it is difficult tohave a conversation the closer you get to the sides of the saisya. The accompaniment isbasically simple, consisting of large drums and gongs that are played rhythmically inquintuple and septuple meters. The mixture of the metallic sound of the gongs, naturalsounds of the drums, and wind-like sound of the bamboo flute was superb and sounded
to me like a jazz session. Although I heard from people connected with the festival that
there are some new residents that complain about the sounds made by these
instruments at night, a sign of recent times, the festival was indeed a great sight tobehold with women and children also creating the musical accompaniment.