Light from a single candle bounces off a painting. Images of intrigue, blood, horror and revulsion are made all the more intriguing, bloody, horrible and revolting by the flickering and shadows. The painting is as tall as a man – it was created in the nineteenth century and it is unsettling and disturbing. There are painted people peering around screen doors here, unsheathing blades there and bleeding bleeding everywhere. Their painted eyes are looking three steps ahead or are twisted into some lunatic trance.
This tiny town in Kochi has many paintings by the same artist on display by night in the sticky summer heat with a Pacific breeze barely cooling things. Tonight, the town belongs to a painter who was known as Ekin– and from the look of these paintings it probably doesn't make any difference to him that he has been dead for one hundred and forty years. We are under his spell.
Akaoka claims to be Japan’s smallest town. But does it have Japan’s spookiest festival?
Take a walk through Akaoka and let’s find out.
I am a little over a year late but I am here. It’s the Ekin festival (絵金祭り) in the little town of Akaoka (赤岡町) in Kochi prefecture. The town can be accessed by getting a train along the Gomen Nahari line from the big transport hub of Kochi Station. Each station along this line from Gomen Station to Nahari Station has got its own mascot. Akaoka Station’s mascot is a very mischievous looking Mr. Ekin himself. Very appropriate. Japan tends to attach a mascot to just about everything. Marugame City, for example, has an anthapomorphised, greasy, garlicky chicken leg-on-the-bone who walks a turtle like it’s a doge. And then, of course, there's the prison with its own mascot. I think I saw a mermaid, an angel and a man with a fish on his head along this line. So Mr. Ekin is in good company.
Is he plotting something?
This festival is a celebration of the works of Ekin. Kinzo, also known as Ekin, was a prodigious artist. He found patronage in the aristocracy of the day in the Tosa domain. He underwent extensive training to improve his techniques having shown great promise and flair as a child. But despite this, he fell from grace because of allegations of forgery when he was an established painter.
He was exiled from noble society and found refuge with his family in Akaoka away from the decadence of what is now Kochi city. Here in the tiny town, he honed his craft even more. The legacy of his time in Akaoka is the festival and the paintings that are put on display on the third weekend of July every year.
His style combines blood, the crazy eyes, murder, suicide, kidnappings, ultimatums, surrenders, beheadings and disembowelments. Outlines of figures, faces and structures have defined black lines. There are gold borders around the screens. The colours are fascinating and enhanced by the lighting or lack thereof.
These paintings are put out on display in the narrow streets of Akaoka for all the world to see. Each piece folds down the middle in the byobu-e screen style. This display style adds a lot to the atmosphere. Each painting has so much happening inside its borders that it beggars belief. Every screen has a novel’s worth of plot twists happening in freeze frame, surrounded with gold and shining in a new peculiar way each time the eye tries to understand it from a new angle.
There are eighteen main pieces along with some smaller works and a competition in which contemporary artists have their artworks put on display with a single candle lighting them in the same way that Ekin’s works are. There is lively music on a stage away from the streets which display the art. And there is a haunted house too.
There is a museum in Akaoka which recreates the atmosphere of the festival night which is well worth a visit. Their website has an English section.
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Personal note:
As a fan of E.A. Poe, Gravediggaz and the Necrons in Warhammer Dawn of War, I am not afraid of the gruesome. The art on display in this festival is grim. But the atmosphere is very exciting. Most of the fun is trying to figure out just what is happening in the art. Highly recommended.
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