Through the Ring of Grass

The ring goes up in the last week of June. A hoop of woven grass, taller than a person, standing at the shrine entrance where there was nothing the week before, still green, still smelling faintly of cut grass. Beside it, a printed board with a diagram, like assembly instructions. Bow, loop left, loop right, loop left again, then straight through the middle^[2]. A figure of eight, drawn with your whole body, in the middle of a city.

The shrine where I walked it is Zama Shrine, a few minutes from Honmachi Station in Osaka's office district, where the main rite this year falls at three in the afternoon on Tuesday the 30th^[4]. Three o'clock on a working Tuesday. The ring stands for days before the rite, and anyone can walk it whenever they pass, so I went ahead of the crowd. The people passing through it when I was there carried their jackets over their arms, and walked back towards their offices afterwards, cleared for the second half of the year a few days early.

That's the part I keep turning over. Not the ring — the timing. This is 夏越（なごし）の祓（はらえ）, nagoshi no harae, the half-year purification, and its premise is that by the end of June you have accumulated six months of something that wants clearing.

The year is half used.

The culture writes that down, puts a date on it, and builds a door.

The Ring

The hoop is a 茅（ち）の輪（わ）, a chinowa, woven from chigaya, cogon grass^[5]. Kyoto alone has more than two dozen shrines putting one up for the 30th this year^[3]; Kitano Tenmangū in Kyoto hangs one roughly five metres wide and several hundred kilograms on its main gate^[6]. The ordinary ones are human-scale, which matters. The diameter forces a small bow as you step through, whether you meant to give one or not.

There's a verse for the walk: 水無月（みなづき）の夏越（なごし）の祓（はらえ）する人（ひと）は千歳（ちとせ）の命（いのち）延（の）ぶといふなり^[7]. Those who perform the purification of minazuki, it says, will have their lives extended a thousand years^[2]. Some shrines print it beside the diagram. The wording drifts from shrine to shrine, and plenty of people pass through in silence, which is what I did. Does the thousand years still count if you skip the words? There was nobody official around to ask.

The origin story runs like this: a poor man named Somin Shōrai gave lodging to a travelling god his rich brother had turned away, and was told to wear a ring of woven grass to be spared when plague came^[1][13]. Somewhere across the centuries, the story goes, the charm grew from a ring at the waist into a hoop you put your whole body through. I can't verify that last part. The logic survives either way: the grass takes the harm, and you walk out of it.

Most of the time the ring stands unattended. It goes up green and dries to straw over its week. I went back at nine the next morning and walked the figure of eight completely alone, which I found I preferred. The last rite I performed alone was setsubun, in my kitchen, facing a wall. This one at least happens outdoors.

Paper Stand-Ins

What the rite clears is 穢（けが）れ, kegare, and the word doesn't translate to sin. Sin requires you to have done something. Kegare accumulates on its own, through ordinary living: contact, fatigue, the friction of six months of being a person. Nobody at the shrine asks what you did. The premise is that you've been alive since January, and that's enough.

The transfer mechanism is even more literal than the ring. At the shrine office you collect a 人形（ひとがた）, a hitogata, a paper cut-out in the shape of a person. You write your name and age on it, rub it over your body, breathe on it three times^[2][3], and hand it back with a few hundred yen. The paper takes what you were carrying. The shrine then disposes of it on your behalf, burned in a sacred fire or floated downriver^[1][11]. The broader word for a substitute object like this is 形代（かたしろ）, katashiro, a stand-in. You outsource the residue to a version of yourself that can be sent away.

At Kamigamo Shrine in Kyoto, the disposal is the ceremony. At eight in the evening on the 30th, priests cast the collected hitogata into the Nara-no-ogawa, the stream that runs through the grounds, by the light of bonfires^[8]. There's a poem in the Hyakunin Isshu, the old hundred-poem anthology, written by Fujiwara no Ietaka in the early 1200s, about purification at that same stream on a summer evening^[8]. People have been sending the first half of their year down that specific stretch of water for eight centuries at least.

One piece of etiquette, passed on as I received it: don't pluck a stalk from the chinowa to take home as a charm. The grass, the reasoning goes, has spent its week absorbing everyone's kegare, and you'd be pocketing a stranger's bad six months. I couldn't find an authoritative source for this. I also didn't touch the ring.

The Half-Used Year

I grew up on the other model. In California the year resets once, at midnight on December 31st, and the reset is private. You make resolutions, which are yours, and you break them, which is also yours. The failure has no infrastructure. Where would it go? By February the gym visits stop, and the broken resolution doesn't get burned or floated anywhere. It sits there for ten more months, quietly converting itself into evidence about what kind of person you are. Then January comes, and you reset the entire self from zero, again.

Nagoshi no harae assumes the failure in advance. It doesn't wait to see whether you've accumulated anything; it schedules the clearing the way you'd schedule a dental check-up, on the calendar, before the damage is done. Twice a year the culture says: you are, by now, carrying things. Put them down. The tone is closer to maintenance than to verdict.

I wrote in the spring about the year with no number, the April reset, the whole country stepping through the same door on the same morning. This is the same synchronised calendar doing something gentler with the idea. April makes everyone start together. June lets everyone put things down together. And the June version might need the synchrony more, because putting down failure is hard to do alone. A private resolution broken is a private verdict. A scheduled, communal acknowledgment that everyone's first half has residue on it carries no verdict at all. Rain fell on everybody; everybody dries off on the same afternoon.

What does that do to the arithmetic of a year? A bad spring stays a bad spring, instead of compounding into a bad year. That's the design, anyway. Whether the accounting works on the inside of a person is harder to say.

A Triangle of Ice

In Kyoto, the day has its own sweet, which tells you how settled the date is. Confectioners don't mobilise for vague occasions. The minazuki is a triangle of white uirō, a dense and faintly sweet rice-flour dough, topped with simmered azuki beans^[9].

The shape is doing the work. The triangle stands for a shard of ice. Heian courtiers were brought ice from winter stores kept in himuro, ice houses, to mark the sixth month; commoners never saw it, so they ate the shape instead, a cool white wedge standing in for the ice they couldn't have, azuki on top because the red beans drive off misfortune^[9]. Some Kyoto shops sell minazuki only on the 30th, with queues from the morning^[10]. You eat it that day or not at all. Supermarkets are less romantic about it; the packs appear next to the egg sandwiches in the last week of June.

Minazuki, 水無月（みなづき）, is also the old name for the sixth month itself, the same word that opens the verse at the ring.

You eat the month to finish the month.

Mine came from a supermarket in Osaka, eaten standing in my kitchen, and it was fine. Cold, dense, barely sweet. The azuki carries it.

The Durable Half

The rite has a twin. The 大祓（おおはらえ）, ōharae, the great purification, is performed twice a year, at the end of June and the end of December^[1], and the December edition closes out the year on New Year's Eve^[11]. On paper the two are symmetrical. The year gets two drains, six months apart.

In practice they've never been equal. The paired rite goes back to the court calendar of the ritsuryō era, the codified state of the seventh and eighth centuries, and the winter observance lapsed for long stretches of history while the summer one survived among ordinary people^[1]. At most shrines I could find, the chinowa itself is a summer-only structure.

December gets a rite; June gets a door.

Osaka, being Osaka, keeps an exception. Sumiyoshi Taisha holds its nagoshi rite on the 31st of July, as the climax of its grand summer festival, a month after everyone else^[12]. Even a synchronised calendar has a neighbourhood that runs late.

The name is the modest part of the whole thing. Nagoshi means passing the summer, getting across it. The rite makes no claim that the second half will be better; the worst of the heat is still ahead, and everyone walking the ring knows it. It only closes the first half, formally, so you don't have to carry that into the hot months as well.

I walked the eight, bowed where the ring made me, and came out the far side into the same grey, humid morning, holding the same unfinished June. But a paper version of me went off with everyone else's, into a fire or down a river, I didn't ask which, and the ledger says the half-year is settled. A forgiveness you don't have to earn, only attend. Should that work? I walked through a hoop of dried grass on a weekday morning and felt lighter, and I've decided not to audit that too closely.