The Ochiai deer dance: a traditional dance in a modern world.

IN JAPAN, SHRINE FESTIVALS HAVE BEEN THE FOCAL POINT OF POPULAR culture in rural and urban communities for hundreds of years (Ashkenazi 4; Littleton 195; Honda 6). Folk performances formed the core of shrine festivals until their decline during World War II (Ikeda 121). During the postwar period, a variety of state policies have encouraged the revival of old traditions and the creation of new local practices (Knight 250; Robertson 26), but neither has been as popular or highly revered as the original. In the most unlikely communities, however, prewar folk traditions continue to survive.

In Ochiai, a small rice farming hamlet in Towa-cho, Iwate prefecture, the deer dance, known locally as shishi odori, has endured Japan's feudal era, World War II, and the nation's postwar industrial growth period. In recent decades, modernity has ushered in a set of new challenges. Depopulation, economic decline, the lack of young people, and aging in northeastern Japan, known as the Tohoku region, are crippling once thriving agricultural hamlets like Ochiai (Kelly 215; Knight 255; Thompson 174). Yet, here and in other similar rural agricultural cooperatives across Japan, local folk performance traditions uninterrupted for centuries continue to thrive. A closer look at the history of Ochiai and shishi odori will reveal why.

Ochiai is one of ten hamlets in Nakanai, one of Towa-cho's four municipal districts (see Figure 1). Consisting of approximately 160 residents (see Table 1), there are forty-one households in the hamlet, most of which are rice farms. Until fifteen years ago, over half of these households contained three-generation families. Now, only five such households remain. Full-time farming is no longer financially viable as a sole means of subsistence. Fewer than ten children now live in Ochiai. A third of hamlet residents are over the age of sixty-five. During the week, most working-age inhabitants hold jobs in one of the larger neighboring towns, leaving grandpa and grandma to look after the family farm.

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Unlike the prewar days, Ochiai no longer has an active shrine association to support shishi odori financially, nor enough local residents to perform the folk tradition that has served as a signature of the collective for over two hundred years. But instead of succumbing to the demise of their local heritage, Ochiai's remaining inhabitants have set out to recreate shishi odori, making it more widespread, more accessible, and more popular than ever. I would like to explore this process by examining how Ochiai residents have resituated shishi odori socially and culturally, and in the theaters of politics, economics, diplomacy, and trade. (1)

The Shishi Odori Tradition

Shishi odori as a folk performance is enacted by a troupe of six to twelve dancers who act out a parable that incorporates ritualistic movements expressed through the anthropomorphic behavior of deer that mediate the real and spiritual worlds (see Figure 2). Town hall records document that shishi odori troupes danced house to house in the hamlets that now comprise Towa-cho until the end of World War II. During the spring planting season, in midsummer during the Bon Festival, (2) and on New Year's Day, performers led by a shrine priest chanted prayers and performed rituals designed to ward off evil by activating the nurturing power of ancestral spirits. In Ochiai, the parishioners of the local Kumano Shrine, guided by their head priest, managed the troupe and the ritual, arranging performances for protective blessings and bestowing good fortune upon hamlet residents at births, weddings, funerals, and exorcisms. Ochiai's shishi odori troupe even made house calls.