It is one of the wildest festivals in Japan: At the famous Somin-sai festival, hordes of men, all wearing nothing more than a thong-shaped loincloth and thin socks, engage in fierce fighting at night in winter temperatures. They want to get hold of a hemp bag with good luck charms in the belief that this will protect them from harm. The spectacle at Kokusekiji Temple in northeastern Iwate Prefecture has a 1,000-year history – but that has now ended.
The shrine decided to stop the festival because the participants were aging and there was a lack of successors who could carry on the tradition, the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported. This means that one of Japan’s most bizarre folk festivals is falling victim to rapid aging. No other industrialized country is aging as quickly as Japan.
And so this year, hordes of almost naked men gathered in the temple for the last time in the freezing cold. They first purified themselves in a river and then went to a hall of the shrine, where they prayed for a good harvest and other blessings before wrestling over a hemp sack containing small good-luck charms, the newspaper reported.
The Somin-sai festival was one of the three most important “Hadaka Matsuri”, festivals of naked men, in the island kingdom. This also includes the Saidaiji Eyo in the Saidaiji Kannonin Temple in Okayama Prefecture, 700 kilometers from Tokyo. There, too, at night in wintry temperatures, 10,000 men in loincloths and thin socks scramble to get hold of two wooden sticks in the belief that they will bring good luck for a year.
