Miura City is located on a peninsula in Kanagawa Prefecture in central Japan. It is a military base on the Pacific and is a harbor that provides shelter to passing ships. Using dances demonstrated by visiting sailors, the people of Miura created a dance to celebrate the New Year and bring prosperity and a bountiful catch of fish in the months to come. This dance started in the Edo period and by the middle of the eighteenth century, the ceremony had developed into a showcase for local girls' talent.
The Chakkirako dance is performed every year on January 15th, indoors or outdoors. The performance celebrates a happy new year and prays for a bountiful catch of fish, a plentiful harvest, and prosperity for every family. Five to ten women aged between the 40s and 70s perform the songs while ten to twenty girls aged between 5 and 12 dance to the songs. A number of the songs are based on traditional ones from the early seventeenth century while others are derived from popular ones from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. The girls are dressed in colorful kimonos, which are worn on New Year's Day or other celebratory days.
Five of the six repertoires include face-to-face dances, in which the girls dance in two lines. Another involves a circle in a different repertoire. In the remaining repertoire, the girls dance face-to-face or in a circle with a folding fan in each hand. In the other five repertoires, the girls dance with a thin bamboo of twenty-five centimeters in length in each hand, clapping these two bamboos as they twirl. The name Chakkirako was given to this performing art because of the sound of this clapping; the Japanese call it "chakkirako," and this clapping became popular in the middle of the twentieth century. Bamboos are the only instruments used in Chakkirako.
Since Chakkirako is now performed to the public every year on January 15th, the performers concentrate on practicing and rehearsing for one week before the event. Elderly women instruct the girls in this tradition, so it is passed from generation to generation. The transmitters', or practitioners', communities and the people living in those communities are proud of it and present it as one of their own distinctive cultures. They consider it as a unique culture from their culture and thus reaffirm their identity. The transmission of Chakkirako before the public would serve as an opportunity to contribute to the continuity of those groups and communities.
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