Niiname-sai

Niiname-sai is the harvest thanksgiving of Shinto, the offering of the season's newly harvested grain to the kami, held in late autumn. Its central act is the presentation of the new rice, and at the imperial level it is one of the most important rites of the ritual year: the emperor, in his priestly role, offers the new grain to the deities, above all to the sun deity Amaterasu, and himself partakes of it, an act understood to renew the relationship between the ruler, the kami and the land's fertility.

The rite is ancient, mentioned in the earliest Japanese chronicles, and is performed both at the imperial palace and at shrines throughout the country. A once-in-a-reign version of it, the Daijosai, is celebrated by each new emperor after accession as the grandest of the enthronement rites. In modern Japan the day has also been reframed in the civil calendar as a public holiday of labour and thanksgiving.

Niiname-sai's place in the imperial calendar was fixed in enormous procedural detail by early codes of court law and ritual, most fully preserved in the tenth century compilation known as the Engishiki, which sets out the offerings, timing, and precise conduct expected of the rite as part of an entire state administered ritual calendar in which the emperor's offerings to the kami were treated as acts of the state itself rather than as the private religious observance of one family. That status changed abruptly after the Second World War: the occupation era Shinto Directive of 1945 formally separated Shinto from the machinery of the state, ending State Shinto as an officially sponsored institution and reclassifying the imperial family's rites, Niiname-sai among them, as private religious activity performed by the emperor as an individual rather than as acts of the Japanese state, even though the ceremony itself continued with little outward change.

Shrines across the country continue to hold their own local harvest thanksgiving rites on or near the same date, observances that were never dependent on the imperial court's participation and continued without interruption through the postwar reclassification, so the disruption affected the rite's legal and political status far more than its actual practice at the shrine level nationwide.