Utagaki (歌垣), also read kagai (嬥歌), was an ancient Japanese Shinto ritual gathering. Villagers would meet on a mountaintop, where singing, dancing, eating, having free sexual intercourse and the reciting of poetry would occur, in celebration of the beginning of spring or autumn. These events were closely associated with harvest rites, and therefore fertility.
Utagaki (歌垣), also read kagai (嬥歌), was an ancient Japanese Shinto ritual gathering. Villagers would meet on a mountaintop, where singing, dancing, eating, having free sexual intercourse and the reciting of poetry would occur, in celebration of the beginning of spring or autumn. These events were closely associated with harvest rites, and therefore fertility.
==Etymology== The word utagaki might come from different kanji, 歌掛き, a shortening of uta o kakeru ("song gathering" or "song presentation"). Kagai is a synonym used in the Tohoku dialect, possibly related to kakeai ("lyric contest").
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).