The first sign that Dosojin is approaching is not necessarily fire.
It may be a nine-metre lantern standing outside somebody’s house.
In the days before the festival, elaborate hatsutōrō, or first lanterns, begin appearing around Nozawa. They are made by families who welcomed a first-born son during the previous year, with relatives and friends helping to build and decorate an extraordinary structure of timber, lanterns, paper flowers, family crests and children’s New Year calligraphy. The tōrō is a prayer for the child’s health, growth and future happiness, although from the street it mostly prompts the question of how on earth they are going to move it.
They do move it.
On the evening of 15 January, family and friends carry the tōrō towards the festival ground, singing Dosojin songs as they go. Eventually it will be burned along with the enormous wooden shrine at the centre of the festival.
By then, burning something that took months to make will seem entirely normal.
The village starts preparing long before the fire
For visitors, the Nozawa Onsen Dosojin Fire Festival tends to mean the night of 15 January: torches, smoke, several thousand people standing in the snow and a wooden shrine disappearing into an extraordinary wall of flame.
Living here, you notice the build-up first.
At the centre of the preparations are the village men turning 25 and 42, the traditional yakudoshi ages for men in Japan. They organise, train and work together for weeks beforehand, partly because Dosojin is not something you can bluff your way through after a quiet December.
There is a great deal of heavy timber involved.
On 13 January, two enormous sacred trees are hauled down from Hikage and through the village towards the festival ground. They travel slowly, attached to long ropes and surrounded by men doing the pulling, while the rest of Nozawa rearranges itself around them.
It is quite a sight if you encounter it unexpectedly.
One minute you are walking home from the mountain wondering what to do about dinner. The next, several tonnes of beech tree are coming around the corner.
Residents appear from houses and businesses as the procession passes. There is sake, chanting, encouragement and a great deal of stopping and starting. The narrow turns through the village are difficult enough with an ordinary vehicle in January; with an eighteen-metre sacred tree, they become something of a group project.
This is usually the point when the festival begins to make sense. It is not an evening performance waiting for an audience. For several days, ordinary village life simply makes room for it.
Then they build the shrine
On the 14th, construction begins on the shaden, the huge temporary shrine that will become the centre of the fire battle the following night.
It is assembled using traditional methods, without nails or wire, and work continues into the night before finishing on the 15th. The men have already spent days moving timber and preparing the site, and the mood around the construction is noticeably more concentrated than the sake-fuelled procession through the village.
The shaden and the towering hatsutōrō look particularly strange together.
Everything is beautifully and painstakingly made.
Nothing is expected to survive the night.
Dosojin themselves are folk deities traditionally associated with protecting village boundaries from misfortune. In Nozawa they are also connected with marriage, fertility and children’s wellbeing, which is why the first-born son’s tōrō belongs so naturally within the festival. Small wooden Dosojin couples are still kept in homes around the village, a rather modest domestic version of a tradition that becomes considerably less modest once January arrives.
The night everyone comes to see
By early evening on the 15th, the village begins moving towards the festival ground.
At first, there is a lot of waiting. People stamp their feet in the snow, drums and voices carry across the site and the shaden sits above everyone looking surprisingly peaceful given the intentions of the crowd below.
The men turning 42 take their places high on the shrine. The 25-year-olds defend it from the base. Later, the sacred fire arrives and villagers advance with burning bundles of reeds, trying to reach the structure while the younger men push them back.
It is difficult to explain the difference between seeing photographs of this and standing close enough to feel it.
There is smoke everywhere. Sparks disappear into the snow. The defenders are working properly hard, the attackers are equally committed, and above them the older men remain on the shrine chanting while an increasingly large amount of fire moves around underneath.
From the back of the crowd it can look ceremonial.
From nearer the front, it looks like exactly what it is: several hundred villagers trying very hard to set a building on fire while several dozen others try equally hard to stop them.
Eventually the defence ends.
Once the shaden is allowed to burn, all that timber, rope and careful construction disappears astonishingly quickly. The heat reaches across the snow and for a few minutes a January night in Nozawa becomes much warmer than anybody dressed for it expected.
You are watching a village tradition, rather than a show about one.
What makes Dosojin memorable, though, is not simply the size of the fire. The people taking part are not performers. They are people you see around the village throughout the year, carrying out something their parents and grandparents knew long before visitors began arranging ski holidays around it.
The part almost nobody tells visitors about
The following morning is one of our favourite parts.
Most visitors have seen the fire, gone home and assumed Dosojin is finished.
It isn’t.
On 16 January, the crowds have disappeared but the remains of the shaden are still smouldering. Local families return with mochi, little grills and soy sauce and cook over the embers. Eating mochi cooked on the Dosojin fire is traditionally believed to protect against illness for the year ahead.
There are very few tourists around by then.
Children stand beside their parents, someone turns another rice cake over the fire and the conversations are happening at a volume that would have been impossible twelve hours earlier. Unless somebody tells you to come back, it is remarkably easy to miss.
Perhaps that is why we like it.
The enormous spectacle is over and Dosojin has quietly become part of ordinary village life again.
By breakfast, the biggest fire of the winter is somewhere to toast mochi.
If you are coming for the Dosojin
If the festival is important to your trip, stay in Nozawa Onsen village and book early.
Visitors attend using admission tickets provided through their accommodation in the village, so staying in Iiyama or elsewhere nearby and travelling in simply for the evening does not work in the same way. The festival ground has limited access for safety and crowd management.
We would also come for more than the night itself if dates allow.
Arrive by the 13th and you may see the sacred trees progressing through the village. On the 14th, the shaden begins to rise. Stay until the morning of the 16th and you can see the quieter final chapter that most visitors miss.
That is when Dosojin becomes much more than a very large fire.
For Nozawa Collection guests staying over the festival period, we can arrange the admission tickets and help with the practical details of attending. If Dosojin is one of the reasons you are coming, tell us when you book.
