Kurama Fire Festival - 鞍馬の火祭り
Late October, I had the fortune of being able to align my classes so as to attend the Kurama Fire Festival and experience the whole event, not having to return on the last train. Several friends and I arrived early enough to see the festivities begin, and spent the night near the shrine atop Kurama Mountain after the mass of other tourists had gone and the townspeople were beginning to clean up or go to sleep.
A Kyoto prefecture website says the Kurama fire festival “is one of the three most remarkable festivals in Kyoto. It is said to reenact the scene of the enshrined deity greeted after traveling from the Imperial Palace to Kurama-no-Sato village, at the end of the Heian Period.”
The festival is ushered in by children carrying torches around the town’s two one-lane main streets.
Here, a boy heads with a torch uphill toward the main gate of Kurama Dera.
As the children marched about, throngs of crowds showed up to watch the festival’s slow buildup to its climax at around midnight. According to the Japan National Tourism Organization, the larger torches carried by adults weigh more than 80kg. The children on the streets disappeared gradually in proportion to the larger torches that began appearing from the outskirts of the town, also headed toward Kurama Dera’s main gate.
From the various torches carried in from the surrounding town was built a massive fire around which gathered, from my estimate, around 1000 onlookers. Confused myself as to what was to happen next (or for that matter, at any point in the festival), a portable shrine (mikoshi) soon rounded a corner. Remarkably, the massive crowd parted without hesitation for a few younger adults carrying the roughly 2-ton mikoshi.
The highlight, or climax, of the festival came with both mikoshi reaching Kurama’s main shrine:
It took several minutes thereafter for the tired mikoshi-bearers to lift the shrines onto stilts, off the shrine’s floor. Those participants with some remaining endurance took turns pounding the same beat on a drum as loudly and furiously as they could, before the festival was ended with cups of sake handed to those still remaining.
I find it remarkable that a festival with such conspicuous elements of danger is open to the general public, gathered so densely in such a small town. At one point the marching of what appeared to be high priests was halted for precautionary safety, as a particularly fiery torch was snuffed by a nearby fire hose. And as far as I know, the whole even took place without notable incident.
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