The Aruka Shrine is located in Ebina City, Japan. Other than being the oldest shrine of Sagami Province, the shrine is also famous for its annual weird ceremony that involves a priest wearing headgear in the shape of green onion.
For the past 4 years, Negi-san, the head priest of Aruka Shrine has been performing an unusual ceremony but only last year that the photos of the priest with the abnormal 2-meter-long headgear went viral. Seen in the viral picture is a masked priest wearing a green skirt and white shirt to match with the green-and-white onion headgear on their head. The fact that it was uncommon made everyone intrigued by this ritual.
The original idea of the green onion ritual came from the head priest’s desire to diminish the formal and stiff perception of religion and priests. It wasn’t the first time for Miwako Kojima to do so. A few years ago, this 49-year-old priest tried to attract more people to Aruka Shrine by putting on a fake panda head and became an adorable character of Panda Myiaji. Then, in 2017, Kojima came up with the ‘Negi Head’ idea. “Negi”, the name of the head priest, had the same pronunciation as the word “onion” in Japanese and so, she wanted to create a character and ritual with that similarity.
Most of the ceremonies performed by Negi head take place outdoors because of how difficult it is to get through doorways with the tall headgear. The most famous ritual is the passing of the head priest through an “onion circle”. Negi Head passes through the circle as a way to pray for disaster relief and peace.
Here is a video of this year’s onion ritual that went viral on Twitter:
It showed Negi Head bending down to get his onion headgear through the smaller circle.
The popularity of this ritual has inspired other priests at the shrine to make their own headgears where visitors can see all of them performing other types of weird rituals and dances.
Sources: Oddity Central