Mt. Chōkai is an independent mountain that rises on the border of Yamagata and Akita prefectures. It has been considered a sacred mountain since ancient times. While it provides a bounty of water, it has erupted frequently, causing great damage. Mt. Chōkai has been both a familiar and feared mountain. Since the late medieval period, this mountain has been a spiritual training site of Shugendō—a sectarian movement of mountain asceticism—and Shugendō villages were formed at the foot of the mountain near the entrance to Mt. Chōkai. The characteristic feature of the Shugendō community is that the temples, shrines, and villages at the foot of the mountain showed a wide variety of rituals and performances introduced from central Japan.
The present paper examines the rituals and performances of Shugendō, focusing on the village of Warabioka, one of the above-mentioned ascetic sites. During the early modern period the Warabioka villagers who wished to become full-fledged Shugendō practitioners had to learn a variety of performances such as the Chigomai (children’s dance), Bugaku (royal classic dance), and Dengaku (agricultural dance), over a period of thirty years from the age of three to thirty-three, based upon the age grade system. In Warabioka, the ability of mastering these performances was considered an essential step toward the social recognition of the Shugendō practitioners．Mineiri shugyō (ascetic practices of the mountain-entry) was a fundamental ritual in Shugendō tradition. In Warabioka, tainai shugyō (ascetic practices within the uterine mountain) was performed according to the seasonal transition from summer to autumn and from winter to spring. The mountain was regarded as the mother’s "womb," and the ascetic practices were carried out in the mountain for ten months during which the fetus grows, is born as a baby, and undergoes a process of regeneration.
At the end of the ascetic practice, the Shugendō practitioners made those performances that they had meticulously learned since the childhood. The ascetic empowerment deriving from mountain ordeals, and the achievement of performing skills were one and the same. Ultimately, a unique practice developed with the conflation of deities and buddhas, and unites with nature through spiritual power and artistic power.
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