Tado Festival

The Tado Festival is the grand annual festival held every May 4th and 5th at Tado Taisha in Tado, Kuwana, Mie Prefecture. It is nationally known above all for the spirited "Ageuma Shinji" (rising horse rite), in which horse and rider as one gallop up a steep cliff—one of the representative traditional events of Mie Prefecture, boasting nearly a thousand years of history.

The festival's greatest highlight, the Ageuma rite, is a breathtakingly powerful ceremony in which a horse ridden by a young man charges up a precipice of about two meters in a single burst. Riders chosen from the local community gallop up the slope with their horses, and the year's fortune and the course of affairs are divined from the number of horses that clear the cliff and the order in which they do so. As the crowd watches with bated breath, the moment a horse clears the cliff brings forth great cheers and applause.

Tado Taisha is a prestigious shrine with deep ties to Ise Grand Shrine, long celebrated in the saying "if you visit Ise, visit Tado too; without Tado, your pilgrimage is incomplete." The Ageuma rite is said to date to the Nanbokuchō period and is designated an Intangible Folk Cultural Property of Mie Prefecture. In recent years, operations have been reviewed with greater consideration for the horses' safety, and the rite continues to be handed down as one coloring spring in the Hokusei region, while seeking to balance the transmission of tradition with animal welfare.