Oharae

The Oharae, the great purification, is the collective Shinto rite that cleanses a whole community of the pollutions (kegare) and offences accumulated over a period, held above all at the twice-yearly turning of the year in the sixth and twelfth months. Purity stands at the centre of Shinto, and impurity is understood to arise from contact with death, illness, and wrongdoing, and to obstruct right relationship with the kami; the Oharae removes it collectively rather than for an individual.

At its heart is the recitation of a formal liturgy, the Oharae no Kotoba or great purification words, one of the oldest Shinto ritual texts, and the use of symbolic means such as paper or wooden effigies onto which impurity is transferred and then cast away into a river or the sea. Performed anciently at the imperial court and today at shrines throughout Japan, the rite expresses the tradition's characteristic conviction that purity can be renewed and the community restored to a clean state.

The prayer at the center of Oharae, known as the Nakatomi purification formula, is preserved in the same early codified body of court ritual law as many of Japan's other ancient state rites, and its wording is treated as unusually old and fixed even by the standards of Shinto liturgy, recited in essentially the same form at shrines nationwide rather than varying by locality the way many local festival customs do.

Historically, the removal of accumulated pollution and transgression the rite addresses was frequently performed by transferring it onto a substitute object, a katashiro, a simple paper or cloth figure the impurity was symbolically passed into before the object was set adrift on water, burned, or otherwise disposed of, a transfer that let the ritual specialist or the state address collective impurity without requiring every individual to be purified in person. What began as a court and priestly rite performed on behalf of the community has become, at most shrines today, an activity ordinary visitors take part in directly rather than merely receive the benefit of: a shrine will typically make paper katashiro available for any visitor to write their name on, rub against their own body to transfer their personal impurity into the figure, and hand back for the shrine to dispose of ritually, extending a form of participation once reserved for court ritual specialists to anyone willing to visit a shrine on the appointed days at the end of June and December.