On the coldest night of the year, a sea of near-naked bodies surges through a temple in Okayama, chasing a fistful of fortune.
It is just before midnight in mid-February, and the temperature is hovering somewhere around freezing. Steam rises off the crowd like smoke from a single enormous animal. Thousands of men, stripped down to nothing but a strip of cotton cloth wound around their hips and split-toed socks on their feet, are jammed shoulder to bare shoulder in the main hall of Saidaiji Kannon-in temple. They are chanting — a deep, rhythmic, two-syllable roar — “Wasshoi! Wasshoi!” — and the sound bounces off the wooden beams until the whole building seems to throb. The air smells of sweat and incense and cold river water. Some of the men have been doused with icy water until their skin has gone pink and numb; others are simply packed so tightly that the heat of ten thousand bodies keeps the worst of the chill at bay.
Then the lights go out.
In total darkness, a Shinto-Buddhist priest leans down from a window high above the crowd and throws two small, hard sticks of fragrant wood into the seething mass below. And the entire ocean of men erupts.
This is Hadaka Matsuri — the “Naked Festival” — and its most famous incarnation, the Saidaiji Eyo, has been roaring through this temple in Okayama Prefecture for roughly five centuries.
What Actually Happens Down There
Let us be precise about the “naked” part, because the name is more provocative than the reality. The participants are not nude. They wear a fundoshi — a traditional Japanese loincloth, a long strip of white cotton wrapped and tucked to cover the essentials — and tabi, the split-toed cotton socks that let them grip the floor. That is genuinely all. In the depths of a Japanese February. Outdoors and indoors, much of the night.
The men arrive in groups, often from companies, clubs, or neighborhoods, and they move through the temple grounds in a single churning current. Before they’re allowed to fully throw themselves into the throng, they purify their bodies. They wade into and splash themselves with frigid water — sometimes from a basin, sometimes from the cold river or pools on the temple grounds — in a ritual cleansing called misogi. The shock of the cold water on bare skin is part of the point. It is mortification of the flesh as preparation: you cannot grasp something sacred while you are spiritually grubby.
So they douse themselves, they chant, they run, and then they wait — crammed into the great hall — for the moment everyone has come for.
The Shingi: Two Sticks Worth a Year of Luck
At the heart of the chaos are the shingi. These are two short, cylindrical sacred sticks — talismans of sweet-smelling wood, each only about 20 centimeters long. To the uninitiated, they look like nothing: a pair of unremarkable wooden dowels. To the men in the hall, they are the single most desirable objects in Okayama on this night.
At the climax of the festival, in darkness, the priest hurls the shingi down into the crowd along with bundles of willow strips. What follows is best described as controlled pandemonium. The lucky sticks vanish instantly into a forest of grabbing arms. The crowd compresses and heaves toward wherever the prize seems to be, and a man who manages to seize a shingi must then somehow fight his way out of the densest human crush imaginable while every other participant tries to wrench it from his grip.
The goal is not merely to touch a shingi. To win, a man has to escape the temple grounds with the stick and plant it upright in a wooden box called the masu, filled with rice, at the designated spot. Only then is he declared a fukuotoko — a “lucky man” (or “fortunate man”). Because there are two shingi, there can be two fukuotoko, and securing one is said to bless the winner with a full year of good fortune. Historically, the honor came with material rewards too. The struggle to actually carry the stick to safety can take a long time and is, by all accounts, the most brutal part of the entire night.
Why February? Why Midnight? Why Cold?
The timing is not an accident, and it is not arbitrary machismo. Hadaka Matsuri belongs to deep winter — the Saidaiji Eyo is now held on the third Saturday of February, running into the small hours. Mid-to-late winter in the traditional Japanese calendar is a liminal, dangerous season: the old year’s impurities are still clinging on, and the agricultural year has not yet begun. It is exactly the right moment to scrub the community clean and ask the gods for a good year ahead.
The cold is the curriculum. Voluntarily exposing the body to freezing water and freezing air is a recognized form of ascetic discipline in Japanese religious practice. Enduring it together, as a chanting mass, transforms private suffering into collective devotion. The midnight darkness for the throwing of the shingi adds to the drama and the egalitarian chaos: in the dark, no one can see exactly where the sticks land, so the scramble is wild, blind, and open to anyone.
A Ritual With Both Hands in Two Faiths
Hadaka Matsuri sits squarely in the syncretic space where Japan’s two great religious traditions blend. Saidaiji Kannon-in is a Buddhist temple — Kannon being the bodhisattva of compassion — yet the rite is shot through with Shinto sensibility: ritual purification, the warding off of evil and misfortune, prayers for a bountiful harvest and prosperity, and the channeling of luck through a physical sacred object. In Japan, this kind of Shinto-Buddhist fusion is not a contradiction; for most of the country’s history it was simply how religion worked.
The purpose, then, is layered. On the surface, it’s a contest for luck. Underneath, it is a communal act of harae — purification — meant to drive out the bad and invite in the good for the year to come. The willow strips and rice in the masu tie it to agricultural fertility and the hope for a good harvest. And the sheer endurance of the cold is its own kind of prayer: a body offered up to the season.
Five Hundred Years of Throwing Sticks at Crowds
The Saidaiji Eyo is old. Its origins are usually traced back about 500 years, to a time when worshippers competed to receive paper talismans (go-o) blessed by the temple, believing them to bring good luck. As the demand for these talismans grew and the competition to grab them turned increasingly physical, the paper was eventually replaced by the more durable wooden shingi — paper, after all, does not survive being fought over by a few thousand desperate hands.
Over the centuries the event grew from a local scramble into one of the most renowned festivals in all of Japan, drawing participants and spectators from across the country and, in recent decades, from around the world. It is regularly counted among Japan’s “three great peculiar festivals,” and the night has become a fixture of Okayama’s identity. At its peak, the Saidaiji Eyo has drawn crowds of participants numbering in the thousands — a startling sight of near-naked humanity steaming in the winter dark.
The Crush Is Not a Metaphor
It would be dishonest, and disrespectful to the men who do it, to romanticize Hadaka Matsuri without acknowledging that it is genuinely dangerous. When thousands of bodies surge toward the same small object in an enclosed space, the physics are unforgiving. There is real risk of being crushed, trampled, knocked unconscious, or injured in the pileup. The combination of cold, exhaustion, alcohol that some participants drink to steel themselves, and the violence of the scramble has, over the years, led to injuries.
This is part of why the festival is organized with care — designated routes, the masu, the structure around the shingi throw — and why it remains an overwhelmingly physical, even punishing, experience rather than a tame reenactment. The men who participate know what they are signing up for. The camaraderie is forged precisely because the ordeal is real: you are freezing, you are crushed, you are screaming yourself hoarse, and the only thing keeping you upright is the wall of other men doing the same thing. Strangers become a single body. That shared endurance — the warmth of the crowd against the cold of the night — is, for many participants, the actual reward, regardless of who walks away with the sticks.
Saidaiji Is Not Alone
Saidaiji may be the most famous, but Hadaka Matsuri is a category, not a single event. Variations of the naked festival are held in many places across Japan, particularly in winter, each with its own local flavor:
- Konomiya / Owari Okunitama Shrine (Aichi Prefecture) hosts a celebrated naked festival in which crowds press in to touch a designated “naked man” (shin-otoko), believing that by touching him they transfer their misfortune onto him and away from themselves.
- Numerous shrines and temples around the country run smaller fundoshi-clad rites tied to purification, the new year, and prayers for good harvests and health.
Each shares the same DNA: near-naked men, ritual purification, winter cold, communal chanting, and the pursuit of luck or the expulsion of misfortune. The specifics — what’s thrown, who’s touched, where the sticks go — vary from town to town.
A Tradition at a Crossroads
Here is the development that has put these festivals back in the headlines, and it is a poignant one. Japan’s rural communities are aging and shrinking, and the supply of young men willing and able to throw themselves into a freezing midnight crush has been dwindling for years. The pandemic interrupted many festivals entirely, and some never fully recovered their numbers.
In response, the tradition has begun to change in ways that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Most strikingly, in 2024 a long-running naked festival in Inazawa, Aichi Prefecture — historically a men-only affair — allowed women to take part for the first time in its centuries of history. The women did not enter the naked scrum itself; they participated in a clothed capacity, carrying offerings, but the symbolic line had been crossed, and it made national and international news as a sign of how far the demographic pressure has pushed these communities. Some other naked festivals, unable to muster enough participants or organizers, have simply ended their runs altogether, holding a final event after generations of continuity.
It is a genuinely double-edged moment. The opening of these rites to women, and the willingness to adapt, may be exactly what keeps the tradition breathing. And yet every festival that quietly winds down takes five centuries of muscle memory with it. The Saidaiji Eyo continues, a banner-bearer for the whole tradition, but it carries on in a Japan that is asking hard questions about how — and whether — its most physically demanding rituals can survive into the next century.
What a Spectator Actually Sees
If you go — and many travelers do — you will not be in the crush unless you have signed on as a participant, purified yourself, and committed to the cold. Spectators watch from the temple grounds and surrounding viewing areas as the groups of fundoshi-clad men parade in, perform their cold-water purifications, and pour into the hall. You’ll hear the chanting build for hours before the climax. You’ll see steam rising visibly off the packed crowd in the night air. And when the lights cut out and the shingi fly, you’ll witness the roar and the heave of the scramble even if you can’t see the sticks themselves.
A note on etiquette, because it matters: this is a religious rite, not a spectacle staged for tourists. Visitors are expected to be respectful — to follow the directions of organizers, to keep out of restricted areas, to be mindful with photography, and to remember that the men freezing in the dark are engaged in an act of devotion and endurance, not a stunt. Dress warmly. Stay where you’re told. And appreciate that you are watching something old, strange, and alive.
The Warmth in the Cold
There is a paradox at the center of Hadaka Matsuri that no amount of explaining quite dissolves. It is a festival built on cold, scarcity, and competition — a fight over two little sticks in the dead of winter, decided in darkness, with real bodies at real risk. And yet what everyone who has stood in that hall describes is warmth: the literal heat of thousands of bodies, yes, but also the unreasonable, exhilarating warmth of being one anonymous shoulder in a wall of shoulders, all roaring the same word into the same night.
That is the thing worth holding onto as the tradition wobbles between survival and surrender. The shingi were always a pretext. The real fortune was never the stick. It was the crowd — the proof, renewed every February for half a millennium, that a community can strip down to almost nothing, plunge into the cold together, and come out the other side still standing, still chanting, still warm. Whatever shape these festivals take in the years ahead, that is the part worth keeping.
Wasshoi.
Power and Pelf 