Japan's Osore Taisai Festival by David Atkinson

It’s not often you see the Japanese lose it. From the passive tolerance of the battalions of stony-faced salarymen riding the Yamanote line in Identikit charcoal suits, to the tsunami of so-called ‘office ladies’ washing through the coffee shops of Tokyo’s Shibuya district each lunchtime in matching sensible two-piece ensembles, it’s hard to imagine anything rocking the status quo. Harder still, in the face of such group conformity, to conceive of a mass display of public emotion.

In a country where the whole national identity is built around a strict code of social etiquette, only Japanese matsuri (festivals) offer a rare glimpse of real life behind Japan’s aloof collective façade. And none more so than the bi-annual Osore Taisai festival, one of the most bizarre witchcraft festivals in Asia.

Here, half way up Mount Osore, a barren volcanic peak in remote Aomori prefecture, people are giving free reign to their emotions: wailing to the right of me, gnashing of teeth to the left. Given the eerie remoteness of the location and the prevailing atmosphere of melancholy, a plague of locusts could descend upon us right now and nobody would even bat an eyelid.

Mount Osore (the very name itself means ‘fear’ or ‘dread’) is, to the Japanese, an earthly incarnation of Buddhist purgatory. Considered one of the three most scared peaks in Japan, it is a site of ultimate pilgrimage for superstitious Japanese. Whether you’re a believer or not, it’s certainly one of the most eerily atmospheric places in a desperately overcrowded island. Ravens cast a murderous black wingspan shadow over the scores of tiny shrines adorned with children’s toys, while statues of the guardian deity Jizo peer through clouds of hissing sulphurous vapour to overlook the craggy landscape.

Each July and October visitors arrive by the coachload to help the poor, lost souls of their deceased relatives with their underworld penance. They add stones to the cairns that litter the mountain while bright pinwheels commemorating the souls of children killed in tragic circumstances spin in the light summer breeze.

Among the snakepits of Tokyo’s notorious Roppongi nightlife district, it’s easy to forget that the Japanese still hold their spirituality very dear. Here, though, in the rural heartland of Japan’s long-forgotten agrarian economy, mysticism and folk religion traditions still have a powerful hold. They also serve as major source of revenue in one of Japan’s poorest regions.

As the festival starts, the grounds of the Osore-san Bodai-ji temple come to life as groups of itako (mediums), wizened, blind old crones with the gift of vision into the afterlife, congregate in makeshift huts outside the temple. They come to offer their services to grieving families in mediating with the restless souls of the dead — for a fee of course. It’s an elaborate show with reciting Buddhist sutras and rattling rosary beads all part of the histrionics.

One of these old maids, Setsu-san, is renowned for giving particularly good séance and, as such, attracts the longest queue of pilgrims snaking across the sun-blanched temple grounds. Aoyama Setsu is younger than most of the itako and distinguished by a shock of bright purple hair. She was blinded, according to local legend, after attempting to dye her hair as a teenager. As the next in line hands over his money, she starts to chant, eyes rolling back in their sockets as she begins to invoke the spirits.

"My wife died three years. I came to know if she is troubled," the customer tells me after the encounter, tears openly rolling down his cheeks. "Now I feel finally she can rest," he adds, before heading off to bathe himself on hell’s doorstep at free onsen (mineral hot springs) to the side of the main hall temple complex.

Japanese folk legend has long talked of Osore, with its surrounding smaller mountains resembling the eight petals of a lotus, as a place where restless souls wander the barren landscape. The priest Jikaku Daishi founded a Buddhist temple on the mountain in 862 and, even today, all Japanese children learn to fear the legend of Osore. "My Grandmother told me when I was kid that if I didn’t go to temple then I might end up lost at Osore," says a Japanese friend in Tokyo. "There’s no way I’d go there," she adds. "Just the idea of that place gives me the creeps."

The eerie calm of the afternoon is only interrupted by the distant hum of what sounds like construction work. After a sustaining bowl of udon (noodles in broth) at a makeshift temple snack bar, I pluck up the courage to ask a monk about the brouhaha as he drifts serenely through the crowd in long brown robes.

"Ah, yes. We have too many visitors these days to stay at the shubuko (temple lodgings)," he says, oozing an aura of Zen calm from every pore. "So now we are building a hotel on the temple grounds." Nothing is safe from the mechanical diggers of progress in contemporary Japan. But, while the souls of the dead are still restless, at least the property developers are sleeping easy.