“Guardians of the Harvest”: A Deep Look at Suwa Taisha Rituals

Cinema Culture Mar 10, 2025

The Suwa region of Nagano Prefecture is famed for its Onbashira festival, taking place every six years. A documentary filmmaker takes a look at lesser-known aspects of the ancient faith underpinning this area’s religious observances in her latest work.

Hiro Riko

Documentary filmmaker. She began shooting while spending time in Nepal as a student, experiencing life in a Himalayan mountain community. Since then she has focused on the themes of nature and prayer in her works, including Himaraya shōfu ni natta megami-tachi (The Prostituted Himalayan Goddesses) and Shōnen to koyagi no daibōken: Himaraya-goe 300 nichi shio no michi (The Great Adventure of a Boy and His Goat: 300 Days Across the Himalaya on the Salt Road). Shika no kuni (Guardians of the Harvest) is her first full-length feature to open in theaters.

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Ancient Faith in the Heart of Japan

Several localities boast of being “the navel of Japan,” but Nagano Prefecture’s Suwa region is truly at the country’s center, in terms of geology, history, culture, and even religion.

The Suwa basin lies astride two fault lines—the Itoigawa-Shizuoka Tectonic Line and the Median Tectonic Line, which intersect there—testament to the mighty forces that created it. The basin, ringed by the Yatsugatake mountain range and the Southern Japanese Alps and with Lake Suwa at its center, abounds in natural resources. It flourished long before Japan became unified as a country and was a major production region for obsidian, which was used to make stone tools. Several prehistoric Jōmon culture (ca. 10,000–300 BCE) sites have also been discovered there.

Lake Suwa is bounded by the grand Suwa Taisha complex’s four main shrines: the shimosha, Harumiya and Akimiya, to the north and the kamisha, Honmiya and Maemiya, to the south. The shrine complex is one of Japan’s oldest and is mentioned in the eighth century Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) in relation to the legend of kuniyuzuri, a “transfer of the land” carried out after a succession struggle between deities. There are more than 10,000 Suwa shrines affiliated with this head shrine across Japan. The shrine came to be known as Suwa Taisha in the late nineteenth century with the amalgamation of the kamisha upper shrines and the shimosha lower shrines.

While at Maemiya there is a honden main sanctuary, the other three shrines in the complex possess only haiden worship halls. The shintai “divine body” venerated at Honmiya is Moriyasan, a mountain southwest of the shrine. At Akimiya, the shintai is the shrine’s magnificent ichii Japanese yew tree, while at Harumiya a mighty Japanese cedar is the object of worship. At Suwa Taisha, ancient forms of nature worship dating back hundreds or thousands of years are still alive and vibrant, enthralling both history researchers and buffs.

Suwa Taisha is especially famous for its thrilling Onbashira Matsuri. This festival is held every six years, in the Year of the Tiger and the Year of the Monkey—most recently in 2022. The trunks of 16 mammoth momi Japanese fir trees are felled in the nearby mountains and then transported by thousands of men down slopes and across rivers to the four shrines, where the trunks are erected as pillars in the four corners of each of the shrine grounds. A highlight of the festival is worshippers riding the trunks down steep slopes in literally death-defying maneuvers.

Deer at the Core of Suwa Religious Beliefs

Suwa Taisha has several other distinctive religious rituals. The film Shika no kuni (Guardians of the Harvest) was planned around following these rituals over the course of a year.

Kitamura Minao, the film’s producer, who has already produced several other films on folklore themes, initiated the project. Kitamura, who himself hails from Nagano Prefecture, has conducted research into Suwa traditions for five decades. Director Hiro Riko, on the other hand, is a Hiroshima Prefecture native who had only fragmentary knowledge of Suwa, gained through viewing scenes of the Onbashira festival.

Hiro relates that “I had often heard of Suwa, but my overriding image was of the Onbashira Matsuri. I actually covered the festival twice, but I did not understand the kind of ritual it was as I was simply caught up in the festival’s swirl of energy. This time, I intentionally avoided delving into that, as I wanted to make a film exploring the core of Suwa traditions.”

Out of the more than 200 rituals performed every year at Suwa Taisha, the film highlighted special rites retaining strong elements of ancient beliefs.

One of those is the ontōsai, which takes place on April 15 at the kamisha Maemiya, where the heads of 75 deer are presented as an offering. Today, taxidermied heads are used, but there are Edo period (1603–1868) records of the heads of deer killed in hunts being offered.

Hiro describes the ontōsai as “a hunting ritual that is also an advance celebration of the abundant harvest to come. Held in early spring, the ceremony marks the beginning of the rice planting cycle—raising and planting seedlings, and the fall harvest. The growth of the rice is divided into four stages, with a rite carried out at each stage. But in Suwa, the ceremonies were always accompanied by the mikari shinji hunting rite. Today, hunting per se is not part of the ritual, but the faithful still believe that some kind of offering is necessary for governing cultivation. I feel that is a major feature of the rite carried out at Suwa Taisha.”

In Suwa, deer had been offered to the kami since ancient times and had also been eaten for sustenance. This was a very unusual practice, as evidenced by the kajikimen, a “dispensation against the prohibition on eating deer meat” issued by Suwa Taisha, the only one of its kind in the country. Those in possession of this kajikimen could eat the meat without fear of falling afoul of the ban on consuming animals in place at the time.

“Centuries ago, people hunted deer, and when eating the flesh, felt that they had partaken of the animal’s life,” explains Hiro. “This sentiment gradually transformed into feelings of fear and reverence, leading to the question ‘what is life?’ I felt this very keenly when filming Suwa Taisha’s rituals over the course of a year. I believe the deer symbolizes the circle of life, where everything is connected.”

Focusing on deer to throw light on the Suwa tradition was the new approach adopted by Hiro, shaped in large part by her experience living in Nepal in her younger days.

“In Nepal, sacrifices were often offered in religious or magical ceremonies at festivals. It would not do to come empty-handed when asking a favor of the gods, and life was the most important thing that could be sacrificed. Just like in the Suwa region, those devotions overlapped with farming rituals and were part of everyday life. When I returned to Japan and visited Suwa, it struck me as strange that such practices were being described as something unusual. They must have been common throughout the country, and I wanted to discover why they lived on in Suwa when they had died out elsewhere.”

Reenacting a Hidden Ritual

In the ontōsai, a deerskin was draped over a dais on which a young boy would sit. This boy, called ōhōri, was considered a living god, worshiped since ancient times as the physical embodiment of the Suwa Myōjin deity.

The kamisha Maemiya has a honden main sanctuary, but this structure is relatively recent, dating only from the Shōwa era (1926–89). The site is said to have been a place of purification where the ōhōri would summon the spirit to descend into his body. This spirit, called Mishaguji, is the Suwa tradition’s object of worship, and although there are various theories as to what Mishaguji actually is, it remains a mystery.

Says Hiro: ”The people of Suwa understand Mishaguji to be a force with some kind of role or power in stimulating the circle of life. I’m not a scholar, and my film isn’t intended to provide an answer as to the nature of Mishaguji. What I would like to do, in fact, is to get to the bottom of why deer are so essential to the rites of Suwa Taisha and what deer represent in that context.”

Records of sacred rituals taking place throughout the year exist, but some of the ceremonies are no longer practiced. One is the mimuro shinji, performed for three months starting on December 22 according to the lunisolar calendar. The ōhōri, the central figure in the rite, would be accompanied by young boy messengers of the kami, where they would seclude themselves in a cave called a mimuro to perform the ritual.

The entertainment performed during this rite was reenacted in the film, based on research by Miyajima Ryūsuke, a scholar of the history of medieval performing arts, who studied the few extant documents on the subject to interpret the performance in a new light.

”Miyajima conducts research in the area from Suwa down the Tenryū River all the way over the mountains to Shizuoka. Traces of the culture remain in remote areas, and although none may be left in Suwa, the arts transmitted from Suwa still exist elsewhere in the region, so I asked him to reconstruct a performance based on whatever fragments of information he could find.”

During the mimuro shinji, villagers would congregate in the cave to eat deer meat and drink sake, and offer humorous songs and dances to entertain the kami. The divine messengers, clad in distinctive red robes, would also take part.

Hiro says: ”The entertainment reenacted the yearly cycle of rice growing. The divine messengers harbored new life in their bodies, to which they give birth in a ritual of regeneration. The messengers left the cave when winter ended, returning aboveground as the spirit of the rice. The ontōsai in early spring is an advance celebration presaging the abundant harvest that will come in autumn.”

In the film, the Suwa Taisha rituals convey the distinctive blend of hunting and agriculture of the Suwa tradition, giving us an unspoiled view of beliefs that continue to exist today.

”The people of Suwa are not the only ones praying to the invisible force of nature and the circle of life. Japanese have always had this kind of sensibility, but for various reasons having to do with topography and so forth, this belief system has remained strong in the Suwa basin. I hope that the film’s viewers will remember that we all once were members of the same community.”

Trailer (Japanese)

(Originally written in Japanese by Matsumoto Takuya of Nippon.com. Banner photo: The ontōsai ceremony at the kamisha of Suwa Taisha, in Shika no kuni [Guardians of the Harvest]. © 2025 Visual Folklore Inc.)

religion Nagano cinema Shintō Suwa