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The Mask and the Clan Her Dance Left Behind

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The Mask and the Clan Her Dance Left Behind

Ame-no-Uzume's uninhibited dance before the cave of Amaterasu has a durable afterlife in a specific piece of festival equipment still made and used today: the Okame mask, a round faced, smiling female mask with rosy cheeks, used in kagura performance and displayed at shrine festivals, on New Year decorations and above the entrances of some traditional shops and restaurants for good fortune. Performance tradition and popular etymology connect the comic, cheerful Okame figure, sometimes also called Otafuku, directly back to Ame-no-Uzume's dance, reading the mask's exaggerated, joyful plainness as a folk memory of the goddess whose ridiculous performance was funny enough to draw the sun herself out of hiding.

Uzume is also honoured as the mythic ancestress of the Sarume, a hereditary clan of court dancers and diviners attached to the ancient Japanese court, whose women performed kagura and other ritual functions and whose name preserves hers directly, sarume meaning monkey woman, a title connected in tradition to her marriage with the monkey-associated Sarutahiko. Between the Sarume lineage and the still-produced Okame mask, Uzume's comic, life-restoring dance has left a continuous material trace in Japanese festival culture that reaches from the ancient court down to shrine stalls today.

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