Matsuri

Matsuri is the Shinto festival, and, underneath the festivity, the act of serving the kami. The word comes from a verb meaning to serve or wait upon, and at its core a matsuri is the ceremonious hosting of a deity: welcoming the kami, offering it food, sake, music and dance, entertaining it, sharing a meal in its presence, and seeing it off again. A developed matsuri runs through recognizable stages, purification, the summoning of the kami, offerings and the sacred dance called kagura, the communal feast (naorai), and frequently a boisterous procession in which the deity is borne through the streets in a portable shrine, the mikoshi, so that its blessing passes over the whole community.

The range is enormous, from hushed rites conducted by priests alone to vast civic festivals that fill a city for days. What they share is a purpose: to mark the turning points of the year, to renew the tie between a place and its guardian kami, and to gather the community around the sacred. For many people in Japan the matsuri is Shinto in its most living and joyful form.

Article one describes the general shape of a matsuri, purification, summoning, offerings, procession, feast, without anchoring it to a specific historical case. Kyoto's Gion Matsuri, among the most famous festivals in Japan today, shows that shape emerging from a very concrete and dateable original purpose: not seasonal renewal in the abstract, but an attempt to end a specific epidemic.

The festival traces to a goryo-e, a ritual for placating vengeful or restless spirits, performed in 869 in response to a plague afflicting the capital, in which sixty-six halberds, one for each province of Japan at the time, were erected and paraded to draw out and expel the source of the affliction, an act of ritual purification on a civic scale rather than a private household's. The rite was repeated in later outbreaks and gradually became fixed as an annual observance of Yasaka Shrine, developing over the following centuries into the elaborate procession of tall wheeled floats, the yamaboko, that now defines the modern festival and draws crowds through July each year.

The case corrects an assumption a general description of matsuri can leave standing: that the festival calendar exists chiefly to mark agricultural and seasonal turning points, as article one's own summary suggests. Gion Matsuri's origin is instead an emergency response, disaster and disease drove the community to a specific act of ritual purification and expulsion, which only afterward calcified into a fixed calendrical event; a considerable number of Japan's oldest and largest festivals share exactly this history, beginning as a response to a specific crisis rather than as the marking of an already-settled yearly rhythm.