Ube Festival

Ube Matsuri is the largest festival of Ube, an industrial city on the coast of Yamaguchi Prefecture, and it takes over the centre of the town for a single day in autumn. At its heart is a parade danced to the Nanban Ondo, a song that came out of the coal mines the city was built on.

Ube became a city in 1921, going straight from village status without the usual stage as a town. Thirteen years later the chamber of commerce put on a celebration for the anniversary of that day, and that is the festival's beginning. Coal had made the place, so the event was called Tanto Sai, the festival of the coal capital, and from 1936 it went by the name Ube Sekitan Matsuri, the Ube coal festival. The Pacific War brought it to a stop. It returned in 1952 as Sekitan Sai. The present name was taken in 1962, to mark it as a festival the whole city takes part in rather than an industry's occasion. Mining in Ube ended five years after that, in 1967.

The nanban was a winding machine worked by hand. Two brothers who farmed at Ube, Mukaeda Shichiemon and Mukaeda Kujuro, built the first one in 1840: an eight-sided wooden drum with eight bars set into the end of it. Three to five people walked the bars round, and the ropes wound on the drum passed over a pulley above the pit mouth to bring up water in one and coal in the other. Imported things were all called nanban at the time, and the name stuck to this piece of machinery too.

It mattered because of the ground. Ube is flat, its coal lies under a deep layer of much younger rock, and the pits were vertical shafts that filled with groundwater as soon as they were opened. Before the drum a shaft could be sunk a few metres; after it, more than thirty. Small mines were still turning them in the 1950s.

The women pushing the bars sang as they walked, and their work song was the nanban uta. In 1929 the literary association of the town and the local newspaper asked the public for words for a modern version. Entries were judged and then revised by Noguchi Ujo, the poet known for a number of Japanese children's songs, and Fujii Kiyomi set them to music. The song went out from the Hiroshima broadcasting station that December with neither its author nor its singer announced. Two dances were made for it at the same time, one in the form of a bon-odori and one for the stage, and it is the bon-odori form that people dance. Yamaguchi has few folk songs that have taken hold across the prefecture, and according to the city the Nanban Ondo is sung as one of them.

The mayor and the chairman of the organising committee open the parade behind a banner. The Nanban Ondo teams follow, each dancing to the standard setting of the tune, and after them the citizens' parade, in which every group works out its own costume, music and steps. Those groups are judged against one another, and the winner is announced on the main stage later in the day. Yosakoi teams come next. Yosakoi is a modern team dance, performed in costume to arranged music, each dancer holding naruko, the small wooden clappers. The road is divided into four or five blocks, and the teams dance in turn inside each of them.

Last of all comes the hikiyama, a festival float on wheels that is moved by hand. The float is drawn and pushed by about two hundred people, young and old. The head of the hikiyama makes an offering of coal mochi before it goes, black rice cakes standing for the coal that was known here as black diamond, and the cakes are then put into the hands of people along the route.

The stage runs through the middle of the day. Ube taiko drumming and the society that preserves the Nanban Ondo appear on it, the latter with its jikata, the singers and players who give the dance its music, and yosakoi teams and local performers take the rest of the time. A guest is invited each year. In 2026 it is the singer Takahashi Yoko, who recorded the opening theme of Neon Genesis Evangelion in 1995 and the theme of the film that followed it in 1997.

Food stalls and sellers of goods gather for the day in a market called Ube Marche. Musicians, dancers and street performers take turns at a spot away from the parade route, and other squares around the centre are given over to the festival for the day.