A single act, offered every fourteenth or fifteenth century in the ordinary sense of the phrase, does not survive six hundred years by accident. Hayachine Kagura began when the people of Iwate Prefecture, worshipping Mount Hayachine as a deity, built a tradition of masked dance around that mountain's presence, performed at Hayachine Shrine in what is now Hanamaki City. What has kept it alive since is structure as much as devotion: six ritual dances open every performance, five more recount the doings of the gods and the medieval history of the region, and the sequence closes with a dancer costumed as a shishi, an imagined lion like creature standing in for the mountain deity itself, so that the performance ends with the god actually present on the dance ground rather than merely described.
The ensemble is drums, cymbals and flutes, plain instruments doing a specific job: they accompany masked performers through a repertoire that was, for most of its history, the business of shrine clergy alone, staged to demonstrate the deity's power and bless whoever had gathered to watch. That has changed. Community representatives now carry the tradition forward, performing it each year at the Great Festival on August the first, which is itself a kind of continuity, a shrine ritual once reserved to priests becoming a shared civic inheritance without losing the deity it was built to honor.