In Japan, an ice-free lake and a god that is not an ancient warning

For at least six centuries, along a lake in the central Japan in a lake, celebrated the depth of the winter by respecting the depth of a depth of the winter.

Only days appear after the fierce temperature turned into a solid white sheet of Suve Lake. First of all, people woke up loud at night. It was broken to detect the source of the dawn: in the surface of the lake, as long as a narrow series, like the back of a dragon.

This was Miwatari, which means the meaning of the holy passage of the local belief in the native Shinto belief in Japan. The appearance was also a sense of fear between the residents who performed a ceremony, which respects them to visit the supernatural, but also imagined the ice. Unless the ice series is not seen in rare winter, God’s absence was considered a warning that the natural world is outside the balance sheet.

The residents were visible, the state of the lake and what historical events were Miwatari. Since 1443, this description has created a significant archive to the centuries of monotonous cold winter in every winter.

But recently Suwa chronicles, a different story, a more exciting story. For the past seven winter, Miwatari did not appear to have the lake freeze. Although the ice-free years are ice-free years, this length has happened once before the archive, and this was half a millennium.

In fact, the Suwa Lake was fully frozen – local residents call 18 years in the last 25 years. Kiyoshi Miyasaka, Yatsurugi’s high priest in the last three and a half centuries, the position of protecting the notes, said he could not appear regularly since the 1980s. O and other local residents blame the extinction of ancient rhythms on global climate change.

“In the old times, a sea of ​​open sea was a bad defect,” said wooden buildings, which are the traditional stone gate and tile roofing of the tile, 74 people from Lakeshore. “We hear about the melting of ice covers and Himalayas, but we try to warn us.”

Most of January and early February, each dawn, Mr. Miyasaka and dozens of parishioners are collected in a standing stop to test the night of God. For many years, they only found frustration.

In 60 and older, only parishioners remember when Miwatari is large enough to make a sound that can wake up at night. Once the last time an ice ridge was in 2018 this difficulty was six inches.

“When I was a child, the ice spat rose higher than the size,” he said. “Taiko Baraban, ‘Gon-Gon-Gon!’ We knew that as a voice is removed. “

These days, Miwatari lost his religious importance. Residents in Suwa, a small, sleepy city wrapped along the Lake edge, see it as a local winter rites. The mayor of the city joins the gatherings in the cold mornings next to the lake.

“It has been a tradition for 580 years,” he said together, “he said, Mayor Yukari Kaneko, 66.

The science also robbed the ice series of their secrets, explaining that they occurred. When Suwa Lake is frozen, the surface is tightened into a slab in two and a half miles. Especially cold nights, ice contracts, opening cracks with lake juice, frozen cracks. As the temperature rose again, the tiles enter the original form of newly formed ice roptes.

Appear elsewhere, including similar ice ridges Mendota Lake in Wisconsin. However, the notes rarely return to detail as so far or in Suwada.

“It’s pretty special in this chronicle because people celebrated the same thing in the same way for centuries,” he said Daymar DegroogCorctaun University, the surrounding history Prof. “This is an example of a cultural heritage that is away and cannot return.”

Mr. Miyasaka said that when the ice series is discouraged by the fact that the ice is not returned, it intends to continue the archive.

“For more than 580 years, Mr. Miyasaka said that for more than 580 years, Mr. Miyasaka, who has been the head of the family for five generations.” I will not be the one who completes it. “

They say the falters will continue to join him in the winter mornings. “I feel a responsibility to continue this history,” Hiroyuki Okazaki, a 63-year-old carpenter said.

Neither Mr. Miyasaka nor his parishioners, the abandoned by a god, Japan became very secular for this. They do not even know that God has to pass through the lake. Ancient notes do not give a name and Shinto is a form of animism that believes in the countless gods lying behind the forces of nature.

In modern times, a fairy tale, a man passing through the lake to visit his wife, but Mr. Miyasaka said that he was the work of entrepreneurial local business owners using romance to draw these tourists. Some local residents added “O” in front of Miwatari to ensure more modern sounds.

The high priest, including the entrances of all chronicles, and now read the oldest in the museum. Most of the pages written in brush and ink and manually built-in books explain that Miwatari appears with the consolatory regularity. During the 17th century, the ice ridge did not appear only twice.

In 1986, his father taught him how to fulfill the ceremony to honor the appearance of Miwatari’s appearance in the frozen lake, and an icy branch under the ice. Mr. Miyasaka believed to do it every year at this time.

Instead, it has been only nine times since then.

“When our ancestors do these notes before the centuries, they did not imagine such a story,” Mr. Miyasaka said. “They have been a global warming warning.”