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Onbashira is one of Japan’s most spectacular festivals. Every six years, sixteen great fir trunks are brought to stand as sacred pillars at the four Grand Suwa Shrines, symbolically rejuvenating the Shinto deity within.
Although Japan often presents a unified face to the outside world, Onbashira is exotic even to many natives. The festival, evolved over twelve hundred years, embodies a distinctive and proud local identity. In the face of urbanization and globalization, over a century which has brought the area from rice paddies to railroads and from silk to scanners, the event has become a defining tradition – and tourist draw – for the region.
Heavy, handmade straw ropes are attached to the pillars, which can weigh up to ten tonnes. Wearing colourful, traditional costumes, thousands of shrine parishioners hand-pull the logs, with their teams of riders, down from the forested mountains and into the shrines.
The Upper and Lower Shrines celebrate the two stages of the festival separately. Early April begins with the long yamadashi (“mountain run”), which is characterised by a short drop followed by a river crossing in the Upper parish, and by a breathtaking and notorious and sometimes fatally risky descent at the Lower. May’s satobiki (“town-coming”) features dances and parades as the pillars are brought through the town and into the shrine precincts. The pillars are then winched to standing, their riders slowly rising above the cheering crowds, and the festival ends. Participants and spectators alike return to their ordinary lives, punctuated only every half-dozen years by a festival that draws the community together in a spectacle the whole country watches.