Karo Nakizumo Festival (Crying Baby Sumo)

This is Nakizumo – “crying baby sumo” – one of the most unusual and entertaining events in Karo’s yearly calendar. Each year, on the first Sunday in September, around 120 babies from Tottori Prefecture and beyond are brought to Karo Shrine to take part in a contest whose object is wonderfully simple: cry first, or cry hardest, and receive a blessing for health, strength and good fortune.

The premise sounds absurd. That is part of the appeal.

Nakizumo is a ritual, but it is also a performance – quirky, theatrical, lightly ridiculous and entirely good-humoured. In Karo, it is not treated as an ordeal for the babies or as an exotic spectacle staged for outsiders. It is a fun day out: a local matsuri in which belief, comedy and community pride all arrive at once. The babies cry. The adults laugh. Everybody understands the assignment.

Karo, where the Sendai River meets the Sea of Japan on the northern edge of Tottori City, has long been associated with the sea. Fishing has been an important part of local life, and crab and squid remain among its best-known catches. But that is no longer the whole story. To describe Karo simply as a fishing village now would be too blunt, too old-fashioned, too narrow. Fishing still matters. It does not define everyone. The area has become an attractive place for young families and for people living and working in Tottori City, drawn by its coastal setting and its sense of community. That matters here. Nakizumo does not feel like a tradition being preserved out of duty. It feels like one being enjoyed because the place around it is still very much alive.

At the centre of the festival is Karo Shrine, set on a hill above the harbour. Historical records place the shrine in the ninth century, with entries in the Nihon Sandai Jitsuroku between 861 and 878 AD, giving it a documented history of more than 1,100 years. From the shrine grounds, the harbour still spreads below: predominantly squid boats, smaller trawlers, the sea beyond. The effect is not picturesque so much as rooted. Shrine and settlement feel inseparable there – religion, labour and festivity occupying the same small rise above the water.

That long history helps explain the shrine’s connection to sumo. Among the deities enshrined at Karo is Takemikazuchi, who appears in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki (the oldest official history of Japan) as a god of thunder and the sword and, in legend, as a participant in the first sumo contest. Over time he came to be associated with heroism, martial arts and sport. Karo Shrine, accordingly, developed deep ties to wrestling culture. During the Edo period (1603–1868), when sumo was especially popular in Inaba province – the eastern part of what is now Tottori Prefecture – tournaments at the shrine are said to have drawn spectators from around Japan. Tottori has long produced notable wrestlers of its own, among them the 53rd yokozuna, Kotozakura Masakatsu, who was born in nearby Kurayoshi.

That older tradition faded after the beginning of the Second World War, as the number of local youth wrestlers declined. But sumo did not disappear from the shrine. It survived in youth matches during the autumn festival and, from 1989 onwards, in a form at once stranger and more playful: Nakizumo.

The custom itself is much older than Karo’s version of it. Crying-baby contests have been staged in other parts of Japan for centuries; the best-known is held at Sensoji in Tokyo’s Asakusa district. The belief behind them is straightforward. A crying baby is thought to grow strong and healthy and to enjoy good fortune in life – an idea captured in the proverb naku ko wa sodatsu, or “crying babies grow fast”. In older belief, a baby’s cry could also ward off evil spirits.

All of which makes the event sound more solemn on paper than it feels in person.

At Karo, the sacred logic is there, certainly. So is the comic timing. Parents register their children in advance because the event is popular. The matches take place on the shrine’s outdoor dohyo, the clay-and-straw ring of traditional sumo. Babies eligible to participate are generally those born in the previous year, though the rule is applied with some flexibility. Two children are paired off and carried into the ring. At the referee’s signal, they are lifted high. The first to cry wins. If both cry at once, the louder and longer cry decides the bout. Simple. Exact. And, in practice, wonderfully unpredictable.

Because Karo no longer has enough resident wrestlers to stage the event in the old way, the role of the sumo is played by genial local volunteers in traditional sumo loincloths, or mawashi. They lift babies gently up and down with stoic patience and good humour while parents hover nearby and the crowd waits for the decisive wail. One feels for them. One also admires them. They are central to the event’s peculiar charm: half ritual attendants, half straight men in a community comedy.

The babies, meanwhile, do not always cooperate. Some burst into tears the instant they leave their parents’ arms. Others remain stubbornly serene. When neither child cries after a few seconds, the gyoji steps in, leaning close and chanting naki, naki in the hope of provoking a reaction. The volunteers may gently raise and lower the babies to elicit some emotional response. Once the babies begin crying, they are held aloft so their cries are closer to heaven, strengthening the blessing; the gyoji urges the bout on with calls such as hakkeyoi, meaning “put some spirit into it”. Sometimes that works at once. Sometimes it produces only a blank stare, a look of grave suspicion, or the faint impression that the child is considering the whole business and finding it unimpressive. A few seem almost ready to drift off. That uncertainty is what makes the crowd lean in. Everyone knows the rules. No one knows the outcome.

To an outsider, the spectacle can look faintly preposterous – a sacred contest devoted to making babies cry. It is. And that is precisely why it works. Nakizumo does not ask the community to choose between blessing and entertainment. It offers both at once. The belief is genuine. So is the fun. Karo’s version thrives because it never mistakes seriousness for significance. A tradition can matter without becoming solemn. A shrine event can be meaningful and funny in the same breath.

That tonal balance suits Karo itself. This is a place with an old shrine, a long relationship with the sea and a present confident enough to enjoy its own eccentricities. Nakizumo endures there not merely because it exists somewhere in Japan’s ritual repertoire, but because here, in this particular district above this particular harbour, it still feels local, communal and worth turning up for.

And so the scene repeats itself each September. A referee raises his fan. Two babies are carried into the ring. Parents lean forward, smiling already. Then comes the pause, the tiny suspense, and finally the sound everyone has been waiting for – one indignant cry, rising into the air to the satisfaction of almost everyone present.

To view other photo-essays from the “Matsuri” photography project, click here.

Text and images copyright © Thaddeus Pope. All rights reserved. No unauthorised use, reproduction, distribution, or publication without prior written permission.