The Eighth Day Festival on Miyakejima

Abstract

MIYAKEJIMA is a small volcanic island some fifty miles out of Tokyo Bay in the Pacific Ocean. In this ten square miles of relative isolation a population of some 7,000 people live by means of fishing and the sale of butter, charcoal, and the essence of camellias which is used for perfume. The island population is concentrated in five villages which, until the twentieth century, were so mutually isolated that special dialects developed in each village. On 7 January I957, Yasuji Honda, Masao Urayama, and Hauro Misumi of the Folk Theatrical Society arrived at this island for the purpose of viewing one of its oldest festivals, the yoka matsuri. These men believed that, due to the purported antiquity of the festival1 and the isolation of the island, this event might shed some light on the ancient folk festivals of the main Japanese islands. The Folk Theatrical Society (Minzoku Geino no Kai) which sponsored the expedition was founded in 1952 to study Japanese folk events and encourage the revival of old, and the creation of new, folk theatricals. From I952 through I957 the Society published a journal, The Revival of the Theatre Arts (Geino Fukko) which was to be the successor of the long defunct Folk Arts magazine (Minzoku Geijitsu, I9281932). The Society's journal was in turn absorbed into the more general theatrical magazine, Geino. Besides studying and writing about folk theatricals, the members of this group hope to encourage them by providing opportunities for them to be seen, heard, and studied by other scholars and appreciated by a wider audience. The Society has close relations with the Waseda University Theatre Museum and with the Theatre Division of the Tokyo National Cultural Research Institute (Tokyo Kokuritsu Bunkazai Kenkyu Jo) in Ueno Park, Tokyo. In addition to these activities, the Society has collected many photographs, records, and field reports (in Japanese) from important Japanese folk events. They have also been instrumental in staging several excellent exhibitions of folk dance in Tokyo. At present the Society has some 200 members and is governed by a special ten man committee. The Miyakejima field group was kind enough to invite me to accompany them on their field trip. The report given here is based on the materials gathered by these men as well as my own observations. Since I was a foreign guest, the field recordings and interviews were not under my direction; thus certain details and conditions desirable from a Western viewpoint were not available. This is most evident in the recording situation described below and in the interrogation of the festival participants which covered only a few of the questions found on standard western documentation forms such as name, age, and place of origin. Questions of sources of the music and choreography and attitudes towards it were not covered. Nevertheless, enough material was collected and noted to produce a valid account of this old island festival.