A young woman's attraction to an old and largely unknown Shinto dance has led her to relocate from Kyoto to a small hot-spring town in Shimane Prefecture in the hope of helping to preserve the local theatrical art, believed to date back to the Muromachi period (1336-1573).
The Iwami Kagura at the Tatsunogozen shrine in Yunotsu Onsen in the city of Oda is "a deep world," Mana Kubota, 27, said. "I have to brush up my skills much more, because the local people here have been imbued with the kagura (god entertainment) since childhood."
Kubota first came across the Iwami Kagura in 2007 as a first-year student studying stage illumination at the Kyoto University of Art and Design when Taizo Kobayashi, 35, one of the founders of a group in Yunotsu that stages the dance, performed it in an introductory class at the university.