Misasa Onsen Hanayu Festival (Misasa no Jinsho)

That act of joining is the festival’s deepest image. The tug of war that follows is fierce, but often brief. The binding takes longer, asks more, and reveals more. It turns the street into a place of repeated failure, physical ingenuity and collective insistence. In Misasa, the crucial drama is not simply that one side will beat the other. It is that before any contest can begin, the town must first force two stubborn things into union.

Every year on 3–4 May, during Golden Week, Misasa Onsen stages Hanayu Matsuri as both a celebration of the birth of Shakyamuni Buddha – the historical Buddha – and a ritual of thanks for the town’s prosperity and the hot springs on which it was built. Its climax is the Misasa no Jinsho – usually shortened locally to jinsho – the festival’s great tug of war. The result is read as an omen. If the east wins, the harvest will be good. If the west wins, business will prosper. Recognised as an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property, the festival is not just Misasa’s grandest annual spectacle. It is the place where the town rehearses its beliefs about luck, labour, healing and endurance.

Misasa lies in the interior of Tottori Prefecture, near the foothills of Mount Mitoku, a mountain long treated as sacred. The town’s history turns on a legend from the Heian period. A samurai named Okubo, travelling on pilgrimage to Mount Mitoku, encountered an old white wolf and raised his bow to kill it. He lowered it instead. That night, Myoken Daibosatsu appeared in his dream and rewarded the act of mercy by revealing the site of a spring. By morning, hot water was said to be gushing from beneath the roots of an old camphor tree. The spring became the source of Misasa’s life, and the legend still holds the town in place: the spared wolf, the grateful bodhisattva, the water that rose from the ground as gift rather than accident.

Even the town’s name is a promise. Misasa is commonly understood to mean “three mornings” – an old saying that if a person bathes in the springs for three consecutive days, health will return by the third dawn. For decades the town has been known across Japan for baths with unusually high radon content, drawing visitors who come not for a weekend but for stays measured in weeks or months. Local language has often framed the waters through hormesis – the theory that low doses of radiation may stimulate the body’s protective responses and confer benefit rather than harm. Misasa’s identity has long been shaped in the space between those ideas – between healing tradition, scientific curiosity and an enduring culture of convalescence. What sustains the town’s faith is not chemistry alone, but repetition, custom, atmosphere and the shared ritual of getting well.

For two days each spring, the beliefs that sustain Misasa are made visible through labour. The jinsho begins not with the contest itself, but the day before, with vines. At Hanayu Matsuri, those invisible convictions take material form in the immense lengths of wisteria cut from the sacred grounds around Mount Mitoku and prepared by hand. Long before festival day, the harvested vines are soaked in the Mitoku River until they soften enough to be worked. When they are ready, they are hauled on to the riverbank, where teams beat, twist and braid them into the giant ropes used in the jinsho. The work takes the better part of a day. Older, more experienced hands lead it. Tea and alcohol pass among the workers. What results is not something manufactured so much as something collectively wrestled into being. It is not backstage work. It is part of the ritual itself, a shared act of making before the shared act of contest.

The symbolism is not incidental. The paired ropes are understood as male and female, and their form is often read as an emblem of harmony with the natural world from which they are taken. That symbolism could sound decorative if the labour were less real. But the point of the ropes is precisely that they refuse to remain symbolic. They are wet, heavy, awkward, bruising things. They require technique, patience and communal discipline. The festival’s theology, if that is not too strong a word for it, is inseparable from its manual work. Misasa does not merely speak its beliefs. It twists them, shoulders them and drags them through town.

By the second day, Hanayu Matsuri has widened into something larger than a single athletic contest. The programme moves through shrine rites, a memorial service at Yakushi Hall, a children’s procession, a children’s mikoshi – a portable shrine – and fireworks before the tug of war takes over the street at night. The structure is revealing. The jinsho may be the festival’s most arresting image, but it is framed by prayer, procession and neighbourhood participation. Misasa does not separate devotion from pageantry very cleanly; that is part of what gives the festival its force.

Then, as evening deepens, the ropes are dragged into Misasa’s main shopping street. The work-chant – “oisa, oisa!” – rises as participants heave the male and female ends on to their shoulders and inch them towards the centre. When the ropes finally meet, the crowd’s attention narrows to a single problem: can they be joined at all? The answer is never as tidy as festival posters suggest. The ropes swing, buckle and slam back to the road. Men scramble up them to guide the heads together. The union is effortful, improvised, almost comic in its refusal to happen quickly. Then, suddenly, it is done. The pin goes through. The lantern is extinguished. All the evening’s disorder resolves at once into a single, enormous tension line running through the town.

The contest itself is often over quickly. For all the build-up, the verdict may come in a matter of minutes as one side drags the other across the mark. East means a good harvest. West means good business. The formula is simple, almost severe in its simplicity, which is part of why it endures. Hot-spring towns live by intangibles – atmosphere, faith, memory, reputation, the old promise that a stay might change how you feel when you wake. Misasa gives those intangibles weight. It makes fortune into something that can be shouldered, lifted, bound and hauled through the street.

And once the struggle is over, the great rope ceases to be great. The wisteria is cut into smaller lengths and distributed to participants and spectators as charms said to ward off illness. The transformation is abrupt and exact. What had just dominated the street becomes something that can be held in the hand or slipped into a pocket. In Misasa, blessings are not abstract. They are made from vine and effort, from repetition and friction. Each spring, the town pulls against itself not to come apart, but to remember the force that keeps it whole.

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.