Encyclopedia of Shinto

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カテゴリー1： 5. Rites and Festivals
カテゴリー2： Individual Shrine Observances
Title
Tendōsha matsuri
Text
"Festival of the Tendō shrine." A rite held on the first day of the horse in the sixth lunar month at Wadatsumi Shrine in Mine Township, Kamiagata District, Nagasaki Prefecture. Three young men are selected as the overseers of the year's ritual. They lead the young villagers to the beach where the males catch kusabi (a type of rainbow fish) and the females gather kuzuma (a type of chiton mollusk). On the day of the festival, special food offerings (shinsen) are prepared using alcohol made from barley, kusabi, and kuzuma, and are offered in a ceremony at the shrine. After the ceremony, accompanied by the male villagers the overseers take the offerings to the beach and distribute them among the men. Female villagers are banned from the beach on this day. The three overseers collect sand and pebbles on the beach and pile them to a height of over two meters. Though the origin of this festival is unclear, there is a taboo area called tendōchi on Tsushima Island. There may have been some link between the name of this ritual and Tendō shinkō as a folk belief. This rite is also known as yakuma matsuri. Some believe that yakuma, which is written in the hiragana phonetic script, actually signifies "inauspicious horse," written with the characters 厄午.
— Mogi Sakae

Pronunciation in Japanese/用語音声

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