Warding Off Evil Spirits, But Not Toll Of Affluence

MIYAKO ISLAND, Japan — With less than an hour of daylight left, the residents of Nobaru Village here gathered on a recent Saturday to drive evil spirits from their community.

Priestesses in dwarf sugar palms followed the Paantu, in the matriarchal rite.

Following a course laid out centuries ago, the procession began outside a grove where one of Nobaru’s 11 shrines lay hidden. A dozen priestesses, with leaves of dwarf sugar palms wrapped around their heads and waists, marched on ground still wet from afternoon rains.

They followed a 12-year-old boy who, walking briskly ahead of them, wore the wood-carved mask of a fearsome elongated face, with a large forehead, small eyes and a thin rectangular mouth. He was the Paantu, a devil or god or ghost.

“Hoi! Hoi!” the priestesses cried, shaking camphor tree twigs, as a boy blew twice into a conch shell in response.

Priestesses have long protected Miyako, a small island in the East China Sea and part of the Okinawa chain of islands in Japan. Though ceremonies and masks vary according to each village, they share a common animist basis: female elders are entrusted with the responsibility of guarding a village’s sacred forests, wells, springs and oracles. The faith, emphasizing nature’s divinity and ancestor worship, shares common threads with the world’s surviving animist religions in Africa and Asia.

The matriarchal religious rites survive elsewhere in Okinawa, which was an independent kingdom until it was absorbed by Japan in the 1870s. But they have flourished here on isolated Miyako Island, reachable only by plane or a long ride aboard a freighter.

And yet, even here the religious traditions are weakening. Having survived typhoons, Japanese conquest and war, they are losing ground to an increasingly urban life, rising affluence and the popularity of pastimes like croquet. Associations of guardian priestesses have disbanded in at least two villages. Elsewhere, few young women seem willing to succeed retiring priestesses.

“We can already see the end coming,” said Anko Sadoyama, director of the Miyako Traditional Culture Research Center.

Yet on Miyako, Mr. Sadoyama said, there are more than 1,000 sacred places that still influence daily life here in sometimes unexpected ways.

In Oura Village, residents recently opposed the construction of a funeral home because priestesses said the proposed location blocked a road used by the gods. A decade ago, the head of a construction company ignored pleas not to build a new road through a sacred place.

“But then one of his workers fell ill, and his equipment kept breaking down in ways that just weren’t normal, so he gave up,” recalled Toshimitsu Oura, 58, a village leader, adding that the road was eventually built around the spot.

Many of Okinawa’s religious practices still remain a mystery to scholars. On Ishigaki Island, southwest of Miyako, ceremonies featuring Paantu-like gods are closed to outsiders. The handful of published photos show two figures covered in grass and wearing bearded masks with long noses and bulging eyes — masks that, experts say, originally came from Papua New Guinea.

In a village called Nishihara, Kazuko Hamagawa, 66, served as a priestess a decade ago. With 60 other priestesses, she helped perform at least 48 rituals a year. About 15 times a year, the priestesses spent the night together in a shrine in the forest, singing a 100-minute song in their dialect. The first 24 verses revolved around personal prayers, while the next 31 were each devoted to a particular god.

But the association of guardian priestesses has withered under Miyako’s new affluence, Ms. Hamagawa said. Only 10 priestesses remain now.

“There are no inconveniences nowadays,” she said. “People can lead easy lives. Health care is advanced.”

Even among Ms. Hamagawa’s peers, she said, four women, citing busy lives, had refused to become priestesses.

“Young people now have jobs,” said Tadashi Nakama, director of the Nishihara District Community Center. “In the past, there was only farming, so everybody participated.”

Indeed, on a recent visit, which coincided with the harvest season for sugar cane, only elderly men and women could be seen cutting down stalks in fields across the island.

In Nobaru, as the priestesses prepared for their annual procession, young boys played the standard game of rock, paper, scissors to select the wearer of the Paantu mask. After the loser still refused to wear the mask, Takuya Sunakawa, 12, was chosen as the Paantu despite his protest — “I don’t want to.”

The procession was supposed to visit a newly built house or one in which a baby had been born in the last year. “But there weren’t any this year,” said Ikuko Tokuyama, 54, the assistant to the chief priestess. “And there weren’t any newly built houses either. Really, what shall we do?”

The procession moved on, nevertheless, with the cries of “Hoi! Hoi!” and the drone of the conch shell. At each intersection, the priestesses surrounded the Paantu and closed in on him, waving their twigs and crying, “Uru-uru-uru!”

On the final, straight stretch toward the village’s edge, the Paantu and priestesses marched alongside fields of sugar cane whose stalks rose taller than the boy and the women. The Paantu frightened a 3-year-old boy, Ryuhi, to tears, and he hid behind his mother and cried, “Let’s run!”

At the border, the priestesses surrounded the Paantu one last time and, shaking the camphor twigs, expelled the evil spirits from Nobaru.

Under a darkening deep blue sky, the villagers celebrated by passing around bags of chips and soft drinks. Crickets and cicadas sang in the sugar cane fields. The smell of wet grass lingered.

Everyone seemed pacified, including Ryuhi, who had stopped crying. He held the hand of his grandmother, Saeko Ito, 50, who had marched as a priestess.

“Aren’t you lucky you came here,” she told her grandson.

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