The Japanese take their dedication to trees to a whole new level with their notorious tree-sliding religious festival, the Onbashira. The festival is only held every six years but has a reputation for claiming lives. The deaths of two participants over the weekend confirmed the festival’s reputation as the most dangerous religious rite in Japan.
The highlight of the event (and the most dangerous threat to injury and death) is when the 16 carefully selected fir trees are brought out of the mountain forests to be slid down steep slopes. After a Shinto purification ceremony, local men climb aboard the massive tree trunks and attempt to hang on as they make their way down the mountainside, a ceremony known as “kiotoshi.”
The two men–Noritoshi Masuzawa, 45, and Kazuya Hirata, 33–died after falling from a height of 33 feet as a huge tree trunk was being raised in the grounds of Suwa Taisha Shrine. Two other men were injured in the same accident and two men drowned when a tree was being manhandled across a river.
But being killed by one of the trees is considered to be an honorable death; it is believed to spiritually renew the four shrines in the city when they are raised at the four points of the compass. The two-month-long Onbashira rites can trace their history back more than 1,200 years–a long time to be religiously sliding down trees.
[Via: The Telegraph]
[Photo Via: The Telegraph]
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