Japundit regularly features posts describing the many festivals held throughout the country. The size and content of some of these festivals are often impressive, but equally impressive are the smaller events held in out-of-the-way towns that few people other than the locals know about.

A case in point is the Mudslinging Festival held every year in Asakura, Fukuoka Prefecture.

This year’s Mudslinging Festival was held on March 28. It’s taken me a while to get around to talking about it—but there’s a picture!

Every year, a “substitute priest” is selected by lot from among the families patronizing the Aso Shrine in the city. The townspeople dress him in white robes and get him as drunk as a lord (or a Buddhist priest) by making him down five large cups of sake. After the “priest” is suitably sloshed, he is blindfolded and made to walk a 500-meter course from the shrine to the statue of a local guardian deity.

It’s a good to get him drunk and blindfolding him so can’t see what’s about to happen and wouldn’t care if he could. Boys aged 10-12 line the path and pelt him with mud from small piles that have been conveniently placed alongside the road. The adult onlookers egg on the boys, shouting, “Can you hit him? Can you hit him?” It doesn’t make much difference about their aim–when the festival is over, everyone’s covered in mud.

Legend has it that the more mud that sticks to the white clothing, the better that year’s harvest will be. The festival has been conducted continuously since the Edo period, and has been designated an intangible cultural asset of the prefecture.

Is this any way to run a religion? Getting people drunk and having young boys throw mud at a priest–substitute or not–and giving it official government sanction as a cultural event? It is in Japan. And haven’t you ever wanted to participate in an old-fashioned custard pie fight like they used to have in the movies? Well, this is even better!

Usually, Japanese festivals are associated with Shinto shrines or Buddhist temples, but that’s not always the case. The Confucian temple in Taku, Saga Prefecture, holds its Sekisai Festival every spring and fall, and the spring festival this year it was held on April 18. I’m late getting around to this one, too—but there’s another picture!

The festival starts with the mayor making an offering at the temple’s statue of Confucius, but the primary attraction is a traditional dance, performed this year by 22 local junior high and high school students in Chinese-style dress. In an interesting turnabout, the traditional dance is also performed in China every year, but only in the fall.

The Sekisai Festival has been held twice a year at the Taku temple since it was built, however, and preparations are already underway at the temple to celebrate its 300th anniversary in 2008. This year the mayor presented the temple with 500,000 yen in donations from area residents to preserve the tradition. Some of the money is earmarked to be spent this fall, when the students will visit China to perform the dance there.

If the Japanese have a bright idea for a festival, by the way, they have no problems with making a tradition of a new one. One bright idea was the Doya Tanada Fire Festival in Matsuura, Nagasaki Prefecture, which was launched three years ago to help publicize the preservation of the local terraced rice paddies. Matsuura’s paddies were selected as among the 100 best terraced rice paddies in Japan in 1999. (Selecting the top 100 of any geographical features is common in Japan—for example, they also have designated the top 100 scenic views and the top 100 mountains.)

After the summer crop is planted, 2000 torches are placed on the paddy ridges at 7:00 p.m. and lit, creating the effect shown in the photograph. This festival was just held on the 7th this month, so I was on top of this one. And if it’s photographs you like, you might try this link to see two pages of photographs of the area and the process of setting up the torches. The link is in Japanese, but you should be able to find the second page by clicking on the 2 at the bottom.

I also want to draw your attention to the photo of the local district in Matsuura in the middle of the top row on the first page. Click on the title below for an enlargement. This is an extremely typical sight in rural Japan, at least down here in Kyushu—the dense greenery, the small shop that sells liquor and also serves as a bus stop, with vending machines (Georgia is Coca-Cola’s brand of canned coffee), and a red mailbox out front.

Some people like living in Tokyo with all the excitement, noise, concrete, crowded trains, and 10 million other people. Not me—I’ll take towns like this one every time. Even if I happen to get splattered with mud from some grade schooler with bad aim.