Controversial issue came up over forcing fish to drink sake in traditional festival celebration.

Tonami city, Toyama prefecture.
There is a weird traditional festival called “Release drunken carp into a river festival” (厄払いの鯉放流祭り).

This festival is a holy festival which used to be taken place at 金屋神明宮 shrine. (Kanaya Jinmyo Gu) at 1816.
In this festival, several young males and females at their unlucky year (厄年: Yakudoshi) feed Japanese sake to carps in a wooden bucket and release them into a nearby river hoping that new year is going to be a good year.

This festival looks so strange. However this festival has a history more than 200 years.

A Japanese TV show picked up this festival on Jan 10th and after that TV channel was exposed to a storm of complaints saying “That festival is an animal abuse” or “Even though I know it is traditional festival, but still this is a terrible tradition”.

A sponsor of this festival officially announced that “Alcohol will be excreted swiftly from gills. Therefore they should be no big health damage to these carps. This river leads to a reservoir thus we can easily notice if carps die. But until now we do not se dead carps on the reservoir after this festival ”

Afterward, another TV channel took a survey that “Do you think this festival should be terminated?”

The Result were
Yes, should be terminated: 18%
No, I think its okay to continue: 82%

It seems that public opinion supports the festival for now.

Responding to this result the sponsor of this festival also announced as follows.
“We were surprised that 18% people think this festival should be terminated. We will carefully consider that we should continue this festival or not”

There are not only negative opinions but also supportive ones.
As a matter of fact, most of the opinions are supportive.


“It seems some people really want to terminate any traditional events..”
“I fell so stiff. Everybody says NO to anything.”

Even a commentator on TV says, “It’s a holy event.I think they can continue this event paying a respect to Gods”

We must be careful when we talk about this kind of problem.
Traditional events often look peculiar, but there should be important meanings in them.
Once lost, it is quite hard to get back a tradition.