Doronko Festival

The Doronko Festival, or Mud Festival, is the popular name of Doi no Otaue Gyoji (土居の御田植行事), a rice-planting rite of the Doi district in Shirokawa, Seiyo City, Ehime Prefecture. It takes place in the sacred paddy of Mishima Shrine and gives thanks for the end of rice planting, with prayers for a good harvest and good health. Ehime Prefecture designated it an Intangible Folk Cultural Property in 2000.

Seiyo City's 2023 report on its cultural properties lists the rite as suspended.

History

Rice-planting festivals of this kind were once found across southern Ehime. They are said to go back to Warei Shrine in Uwajima, in 1790. Local tradition holds that Takatsuki Hyotaro, who came to Doi from Kanechika in Mima as an adopted son, proposed the rite to the young men of the district about 1882, as an event for the rest day after planting.

What happens

A rite in the shrine's hall of worship comes first, and everything else happens in the paddy. In shirokaki (代かき), handlers line up several oxen and have them pull harrows through the mud. Azemame-ue (畦豆植え) follows, a comic version of planting soybeans on the ridges between the fields.

Sanbai-oroshi (さんばいおろし) is a kagura dance prayer for a good harvest, based on the farmers' custom of standing persimmon and chestnut branches on the ridges on planting day and leaving offerings there. For saotome no teodori (早乙女の手踊り), a dozen or so saotome, the women who plant the rice, form a ring on stands set in the water and dance in white yukata and flower hats.

The rite ends with otaue (お田植). The saotome stand in one line and plant rice along a rope, facing boys who hold sasara rattles and small drums, to the beat of a large drum on the ridge.