Box 8.2 The Bug Festival
Anthropologist Edmund Gilday describes a cycle of rituals in Hiroshima Prefecture
in which the ancient patterns are still visible. It begins in the spring after the rice fields
have stood silent and barren throughout the winter. The kami are invited from the hills
to the sanctuary zone at the edge of the village and then into the rice fields where
essential exchanges between kami and humans can take place. In Shinto, rice itself is
sacred; each rice grain has a soul and rice is alive in its hull. The soul of the rice grain
is identified as a kami called Uka no kami (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993). Of all grains, rice
alone requires ritual performances. Each planting season, the power of the kami must
be lured into the rice fields and brought to fruition in the summer crop, which transfers
the power (nigimitama) of the kami to the growing rice, and thus to humans who must
eat rice to live. Therefore, essential interconnections of kami and humans have their
most crucial intersection in rice cultivation. The festivals (matsuri) honoring the kami
are human gifts to them; the kami give back life in the form of rice.
Come summer, the nigimitama (power) of the kami has nourished the young rice
shoots and has brought the monsoons, raising the humidity; life is swelling and burst-
ing everywhere, including among insect populations, which pester people and
threaten the rice crops. The kami can overdo it, and in fact, there is always danger as
well as blessing in the presence of the kami. Throughout rural Japan there is a mid-
summer festival known as musi-okuri, the Bug Festival. There are local variations in
how this festival is enacted, but the goal is to expel the pests that threaten the fields.
The entire community and sometimes neighboring hamlets and even towns cooper-
ate in the festivities. Certain elements of these Shinto festivals will be the same: an
effigy of the kami is made and presented at the shrine where the kami—often a named
figure such as Sanemori—resides, luring him out with a splendid and noisy celebra-
tion with drums, flutes, and bells. The major actors are the Shinto priests and musi-
cian-dancers whose performance is to entertain the kami. They circle the temple
precincts or parade through village streets and out into rice fields, carrying the effigy
and waving banners and poles that purify the spaces they move through and dispatch
the bugs. The procession may end at a stream, where the effigy is thrown in, or it may
be transferred to the next village and then the next until it ends at the sea.
The whole village turns out to chase away insects from the rice fields in this
popular midsummer Shinto festival.