夏越の祓と二つの暦法のズレ（見出し行なし。英語の H1 から付けた題）Spiritual Restoration in Japanese Culture

This year’s heat has been the harshest of my 34 years, and with each summer it feels more as though survival has become the key to getting through a Japanese summer. Yesterday, in mid-June, observation points across the country recorded an extraordinary 36 to 40 degrees Celsius. On top of that, the high humidity of the rainy season leaves people feeling shut inside a bamboo steamer, a suffocation that does serious damage to body and mind. Such extreme weather is hard to avoid, especially in cities, which is exactly why the wisdom of the ancient rite of nagoshi no harae (夏越の祓) seems to carry new meaning for getting through modern summers. In this piece, I look at that point.

Some time ago, when the solar term kokuu (穀雨) arrived, one of the twenty-four of the old lunar calendar, I wrote that farming begins in earnest from that point. Now, about two months later, the rains last longer, and people, farmers who have finished their major work among them, enter a season of introspection. This is when we look inward at the kegare (穢れ), the impurity that has built up over half a year, and face squarely the problems that have arisen since. Doing so is what matters most for spending the remaining half of the year richly. In the rush of modern life this has been forgotten, but I consider it extremely important. Since the Meiji era, however, when the government, for financial reasons, abandoned the old lunar calendar and forcibly switched to the Western Gregorian calendar (the new calendar), insight into this season has tended to be muddled.

Under the new calendar, for instance, June 30 is almost here, marking the turn of the year’s midpoint. But nagoshi no harae, held at shrines across the country at this juncture, falls considerably out of step with the lunar calendar. Before the Meiji era it was held on the thirtieth day of the sixth lunar month, which means the last day of minazuki (水無月), the name of that month. I still live with both calendars in view, which is how I notice this. June 30 on the new calendar is about twelve days away, yet it lies far from the lunar thirtieth. Today, June 18, 2025, for example, is the twenty-third day of satsuki (皐月) on the lunar calendar, and June 30 is the sixth day of minazuki. Before Meiji, nagoshi no harae was held on the thirtieth of the sixth month, the last day of minazuki. This year that day lands on July 24 on the new calendar, a gap of about twenty-four days between the new and the old (a gap that opens every year, not only this one).

Certainly, in modern Japan, where the new calendar is the social standard, holding nagoshi no harae on June 30 makes sense. By the old lunar calendar, however, which ancient Japan began by learning from advanced Chinese culture, the time for nagoshi no harae has not yet arrived. This is no simple or foolish matter. Seen from another angle, I believe that mistiming the harae (祓え) is the root from which other problems arise. So while I live by the new calendar socially, personally I live by a “dual calendar system” (二重の暦法), a world of time and space in which I read the state of body and mind by the lunar calendar and adjust accordingly. Watching the exhaustion of people in Japan today, I feel that moving back and forth between these two layers is essential for getting through modern society and, beyond body and mind, for sustaining reiryoku (霊力), spiritual power. The reasons for Japan’s decline are of course many-sided, but I see the gap between the new and old calendars as one of its root causes: Japan’s spirituality torn apart by two calendar systems.

Even so, society in Japan runs on the Gregorian calendar, so nagoshi no harae is generally held on June 30. And although the date is far from the ancient practice, the rite itself strongly retains the seasonal sense and the notion of impurity that come from the lunar calendar, which makes it deeply interesting.

To help readers follow, let me put nagoshi no harae in my own words: it is an essential Shinto rite that detoxifies the “spiritual impurities” (霊的穢れ) built up over half a year, so that we can spend the remaining half in a clean state. Its history is old. Its prototype was already written into state ritual by the Taiho Code (大宝律令) of 701. Because summer was then thought to be the season of epidemics, the rite flourished in the Heian period, when protection against plague became a political priority, and was performed not only at court but at official shrines throughout Kyoto. As a result, old forms of the ceremony survive relatively well in Kyoto’s shrines.

That, though, is the view from the ritsuryo (律令) system, and the origin reaches further back, to the story of Izanagi’s misogi (禊) in the Kojiki. I will skip the details today. After Izanagi parted from his wife Izanami in Yomi no Kuni, the land of the dead, he purified himself at Tachibana no Odo no Awagihara in ancient Hyuga (present-day Miyazaki), stepping on the sand of a riverbed and bathing in the tides of the sea to wash away the impurity. As he cleansed himself, Amaterasu was born from his left eye, Tsukuyomi from his right eye, and Susanoo from his nose. This mythic structure, in which removing impurity gives birth to new spiritual power and new kami, runs beneath today’s nagoshi no harae too, and here we can see the root of the Japanese view of time as a spiritual cycle that repeats kiyoharae (清祓), cleansing, and rebirth.

That is one main source, but nagoshi no harae has another element: the chinowa (茅の輪), the ring of reeds set up within shrine grounds only at this time of year. It comes not from the Kojiki or the Nihon Shoki but from the story of Somin Shorai (蘇民将来) in the Bingo no Kuni Fudoki, one of the fudoki (風土記), the regional records compiled in various places around the same period. In the tale, a man called Somin, who gave lodging to Susanoo when he came as a traveler, escaped an epidemic by wearing a ring of reeds at his waist. At some point this story came to be referenced, and it became the prototype of the custom we know today: a chinowa set up in the shrine precinct, which worshippers pass through three times in a figure eight to avert misfortune.

This custom did not, however, pass unbroken from ancient times to the present. It was in fact interrupted for a long period, and the cause was the rise of Buddhism. From the late Heian period into the medieval era, as Buddhist institutions gained power and wars became frequent, the court rites based on old Shinto practice lost importance, and the oharae (大祓), the imperial counterpart of nagoshi no harae, died out. The court’s political legitimacy was shaken so severely in these years that even the daijosai (大嘗祭), the most important rite, performed once when an heir takes the throne as emperor, and the niinamesai (新嘗祭), through which the emperor renews his spiritual power each year, had to be scaled down, and later almost ceased altogether.

In my view, as court rites bound closely to the imperial house faded from prominence, they flowed out of the palace in search of continuity, and so came to be carried on at the level of village communities. Later, around the middle of the Edo period, as Buddhist influence waned, the rise of kokugaku (国学), national learning, and then of the sonno joi (尊王攘夷) movement, which passed through the Mito school (水戸学) on its way to the end of the shogunate, quickly advanced the reappraisal and revival of Shinto. After the Meiji Restoration, the new government made Shinto the axis of national identity, and the old forms of the daijosai and niinamesai were finally restored, as they continue today. In parallel, the oharae was systematically established as a single ritual form across the country, which should not be overlooked. Unifying the ceremony was one element essential to forming Japan as a unified state, and nagoshi no harae, affected by this turning point, gained the footing for the nearly simultaneous nationwide observance of today.

Incidentally, I have referred to the emperor’s daijosai and niinamesai here to show the tangled origins of nagoshi no harae, but let me say a word about how they differ in nature. Nagoshi no harae is a “reset of impurity.” The daijosai, performed only once when an heir takes the throne, is an “assimilation of spiritual power,” and the niinamesai, performed each November by the emperor, is a “recharging of spiritual power.”

In the daijosai, the heir, purified in body and mind, becomes a vessel emptied to ku (空), takes in the spirit of the shinkoku (神穀), the sacred grain, merges with the imperial ancestral deity Amaterasu, and is reborn as sumeramikoto (スメラミコト), the emperor. The emperor who emerges governs the people by using spiritual power, so once a year the niinamesai is held to restore that waning power and fill it again (jurei, 充霊). Not only for the emperor: what I consider most important for people in Japan is the continual fullness of spiritual power (霊力の充溢). It is true that, with the founding of the unified state in the modern era, these imperial rites were used to establish a distinctive ideology in which the life energy of state, community and individual circulates under the emperor, and that this became a factor running through Japan’s annual cycle of events, but this too needs to be seen from many sides.

Now that we have gone through the basics briefly, tomorrow I will look at nagoshi no harae in Kyoto in more detail, with photographs I took.