Name: Japanese Monster Namahage Festival - they steal your children?!
Uploaded: 2025-07-27T18:27:36.000Z
Duration: 39 min 43 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This is the Namahage Matsuri or the Namahage Seiro Matsuri.

This is really a special festival and because it's the pandemic and I was invited here, there's less than a thousand people so there's loads of social distancing going on.

But they didn't cancel this event and they really wanted it to continue to go and I'm documenting it for you because you can't make it here.

As this takes place, I will kind of try my best to explain to you what is happening.

The Namahage Seiro Festival takes place on the second Friday, Saturday and Sunday of February at Shinzan Shrine.

Young men are purified by a Shinto priest, receive a mask which contains the spirit of the god and become Namahage themselves, returning to the mountain.

On the stage in the shrine's Kakuraden are some performances.

This is a reproduction of the New Year visit of the Namahage which I believe is called Sato no Namahage.

This is a Namahage dance performance created by Baku and Kan Ishii created in 1961.

The Namahage daiko drum performance with lights is very passionate.

It's one of the great daiko drum performances of Japan.

Namahage geizan, descending the mountain.

Seeing the Namahage walk the mountainside with torches is pretty surreal.

They walk down and around the fire in the center of the shrine.

The legend says that they carry knives and they walk down towards the fire where there might be some weak kids who are standing there to stay warm.

Because they're warm near the fire, their skins might get dry, so they use those knives to carve off the skin of the kids.

This is a festival where a lot of kids end up crying and getting freaked out by these Namahage.

Seeing the Namahage walk the mountainside with torches is pretty surreal.   Namahage geizan, descending the mountainside with torches is pretty surreal.

Namahage geizan, descending the mountainside with torches is pretty surreal.

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Japanese Monster Namahage Festival - they steal your children?!

eventually

pandemic

passionate

freak