Matsuri da! (70): Ten ladies dancing!
Posted by ampontan on Wednesday, February 6, 2008
HOW DO YOU PASS THE TIME in a remote village in the north of Japan in the middle of winter?
Well, if you’re a woman and it’s the 15th and 16th of January, you dance!
That’s what the women in Higashidori-mura, Aomori, have been doing for more than 200 years on the days they call koshogatsu, or Little New Year’s. (That was the 15th and the 16th of the first month of the old lunar calendar.) In this village, they also call it Women’s New Year’s.
The dance they perform is known as the Taue Mochitsuki Odori, or the Rice-Planting, Mochi Pounding Dance. (Here’s an earlier post about mochi pounding.) It’s become so ingrained in village life that it is now an intangible folk cultural treasure of the prefecture.
About 10 women from the village gather at 9:00 a.m. to perform the dance in colorful costumes, first at the local Shinto shrine, and then from house to house. Their intent, apart from getting some fresh air after being cooped up in the house all winter, is to pray for an abundant harvest and household safety.
Instead of the bells and whistles, they dance to the accompaniment of bells and taiko drums while chanting “Tsuketa ka, tsuketa ka, korasanosa!” (Tsuketa ka means “Did you pound (the rice)”, while the other part is sort of an old Japanese equivalent to “scooby dooby do”.) As you can work out from the title, the dance starts with a reenactment of rice planting and continues with a reenactment of rice pounding. It’s performed around a mortar, and the dancers wave a small pestle they hold in their hands.
You’ve heard of singing for your supper? Well, these ladies dance for theirs—they are feted with food and drinks at every home they visit, and they’ll visit close to 300 over the 15th and 16th. They’ll need to dance to offset all the weight they’ll gain from that food!
Not only that, they perform simpler “posture dances” at the request of the head of the households they visit. Hey, why not? The men will probably be dancing to the tune the women call for the rest of the year. Isn’t turnabout for the other 364 days fair play?
