Tsurumi no Tamatsuri

The Tsurumi no Tamatsuri is a folk performing art held at Tsurumi Shrine in Tsurumi Ward, Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture—a type of "ta-asobi" (rice-field play) that symbolically enacts the year's cycle of rice cultivation to pray for an abundant harvest. Known as a precious performing art conveying to this day an old agricultural ritual handed down since medieval times, it is designated an Intangible Folk Cultural Property of Yokohama City.

Ta-asobi is an anticipatory celebration in which, before rice planting, the movements of farm work—tilling the field, sowing seeds, planting rice, and harvesting—are enacted with song and dance, in the hope that the year's rice cultivation will proceed smoothly and yield richly. At the Tsurumi no Tamatsuri, following the Shinto rite, masked performers and local people enact the process of rice cultivation step by step. The simple yet venerable movements convey the form of faith from an age when agriculture was at the center of people's lives.

The Tsurumi no Tamatsuri was once discontinued for a time, but was revived through the enthusiasm of local people and has been handed down to the present. That a prayer for cultivation dating from the medieval period is still enacted in the urbanized land of Yokohama is the fruit of people's efforts to protect and pass on regional history and culture. Praying for an abundant harvest with the arrival of spring, this festival is carefully preserved as a precious folk culture conveying the fading memories and prayers of rural life to the present age.