Takisanji Oni Matsuri

That reversal is the festival’s animating idea. Takisanji Oni Matsuri is a rite of purification and protection, staged at a temple whose main hall is itself a nationally designated Important Cultural Property, while the festival was designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property of Japan in March 2025. Local tradition traces the festival to a vow by Minamoto no Yoritomo (1147–1199), the first shogun of the Kamakura shogunate, though the historical record is less tidy than legend: official sources are clearer on what came later – a revival in 1647 under the third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu (1604–1651), and a resumption in 1888 after an early-Meiji interruption.

One of the festival’s most distinctive features is the blessing of local males aged 12, 25 and 42. Three representatives from those age groups take the central masked roles: the 42-year-old wears the Grandfather mask, the 25-year-old the Grandmother mask, and the 12-year-old the Grandchild mask. Twenty-five and 42 are standard male yakudoshi – unlucky years, with 42 widely treated as the gravest – while the youngest role appears to mark the first full return of the birth-year zodiac, the threshold many shrines describe as age 13 in kazoe counting. The rite singles out boys and men at ages associated with danger, transition and the need for ritual protection.

The masks themselves are traditionally attributed to Unkei (1151–1223), one of the great sculptors of the Kamakura period, though official festival descriptions present that as received tradition rather than settled fact. More important to the rite is what the masks signify. Fearsome as they look, the three oni – figures usually rendered in English as demons or ogres – are protective beings: they carry an axe, a striker and kagami mochi – objects understood not simply as weapons, but as ritual emblems tied to purification, abundance and the expulsion of malign forces.

Before they can wear the masks, the chosen performers undergo seven days of purification. They live apart, avoid contact with women, and abstain from eating the meat of four-footed animals; even cooking is traditionally done by men. On the morning of the festival they draw water from the nearby San-gai Falls – a waterfall associated in temple legend with En no Ozunu – heat the water, and take a final bath before dusk.

Legend sharpens the mood further. According to temple tradition, the set of masks once included a Father and a Mother as well. Two travelling monks, the story goes, wore those masks without first observing the required purification. When the rite ended, the masks would not come off; the men suffocated and were buried near the temple at what is now called the Oni Mound. Each year roasted grains are scattered there and a short verse is recited:

春秋の
芽の生うる時
出で来たれ

In spring and autumn,
when buds begin to sprout,
come forth.

The festival does not rush straight to fire. The Twelve Men – hereditary role-holders from the old valleys once attached to the temple – lead the proceedings. There is a Buddhist service, a memorial at the Oni Mound, and then an agricultural performance known as the Garden Festival, in which the year’s rice work is mimed from ploughing to planting. Only after that do the lights drop and the fire rite begin. The flames are the climax, but harvest is the logic beneath them.

On the festival night, the three masked figures are joined by around 30 men born under the festival year’s zodiac sign. After the rites, they move through and around the hall with blazing torches while drums, bells, double gongs and conch shells crash around them. The three oni, in red robes, circle the outer hall and the gallery: the Grandfather and Grandchild with axes, the Grandmother with a striker. On a later pass they carry great kagami mochi, promising abundance even as the fire whips round them. In that chaos, everyone involved remains on high alert: if anything goes wrong, the wooden hall is at real risk of catching fire. It is the fire rite that leaves the deepest impression: a controlled storm of heat and noise inside a centuries-old wooden building, so intense that first-time spectators often seem unable to decide whether they are watching a ceremony or the edge of disaster. At the fiercest moment the Grandchild is lifted onto the finial of the balustrade and shakes the rice cake above the blaze.

When the great torches are finally extinguished, people do not hurry away. They queue instead to take home charred fragments of the torches as lucky charms for household safety. The kagami mochi is cut up and shared through the neighbourhood the next day.

The marvel of Takisanji Oni Matsuri lies not only in the amount of fire it dares to bring indoors, but in the way it binds danger to blessing. Terror is never the point. The flames are there to cleanse, the noise to drive out defilement, and the masked oni to promise that peace and harvest might endure for another year.

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.