🏮 Nakayama no Imo Kurabe Matsuri

中山の芋競べまつり

Hino, Shiga (Kumano Shrine) · Every year on 1 September

352 days to go
Rooms around Hino, Shiga fill up while the festival is on.

Omi Nakayama's Imo Kurabe Matsuri is held at Nogamiyama in Hino, Shiga Prefecture, on the first Sunday of September each year. The east and west settlements compete before the deities of Kumano Shrine over the length of their taro, a traditional festival with no parallel anywhere else in Japan. In 1991 it was designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property of Japan. The festival is said to be an agricultural encouragement rite dating back to the late Heian period, and there is no established explanation for why taro length is the basis of the competition. Various theories have been handed down: that it is a remnant of the taro that was a staple food before rice cultivation, or that "imo" (taro) is a substitute for the deity who governs iron implements. On the day of the festival, each settlement ties its largest taro to a moso bamboo pole, and after a sake-cup ceremony at Kumano Shrine, they climb Nogamiyama by separate routes. At the ritual site on the mountain, young men called yamawaka perform a solemn ceremony lasting about two hours, including three-three-nine exchanges of sake cups, ceremonial sumo offerings, and an exchange of gifts, and finally the length of the taro is compared to decide victory or defeat. If the taro from Nishitani is longer, it is believed to be a good harvest; if the taro from Higashitani is longer, a poor harvest.