Abstract

The Ombashira Festival, held every six years at Suwa Shrine in central Japan, is one of the country’s most prominent ritual festivals. It is characterized by large-scale collective labor, ritualized risk-taking, and communal singing known as Kiyari. While the festival has been extensively discussed in ethnographic and historical research, there has been little systematic statistical investigation into how Kiyari performers are socially and demographically constituted and how their participation is maintained over time.
This study aims to clarify, through quantitative and statistical analysis, who becomes a Kiyari singer, under what conditions, and through which social relationships participation is sustained. The study area is the Suwa region in Nagano Prefecture, with a total population of approximately 190,000 in 2021. A postal survey was conducted between February and March 2023 using a random sample of about 2,000 residents aged 20–79 drawn from municipal electoral registers. A total of 2,002 questionnaires were distributed, yielding 837 valid responses (response rate: 41.9%). In addition to the questionnaire survey, structured interviews and event-based observations during festival activities were conducted. The resulting dataset includes variables such as age, gender, occupation, residential district, ritual roles, and prior festival participation.
The analysis reveals clear gender asymmetries in Kiyari participation, as well as substantial variation in self-assessed singing proficiency. Becoming a Kiyari singer is associated with prior festival experience and engagement in other traditional Japanese cultural practices. In contrast, little association is found with participation in music or art activities as conventionally defined. Instead, participation patterns resemble those observed in sports and other physically oriented activities, suggesting that Kiyari is embedded less in abstract notions of “music” and more in embodied collective action.
Beyond empirical findings, this study highlights methodological challenges in quantifying culturally embedded practices and positions ritual performance as a viable object of statistical analysis. It demonstrates how social statistics can contribute to understanding cultural sustainability, collective action, and community resilience.
　　This paper presents the results of a collaborative research project conducted by
Ryuhei TSUJI (Kindai University), Tsunehide CHINO (Hosei University), and Shinichi AIZAWA (Sophia University).