Inside Soma Nomaoi

PUBLISHED 22 NOV 2025

Japan’s Living Samurai Cavalry Festival

At dawn in Fukushima’s coastal countryside, the summer air thrums with the low, ancient call of a conch shell. Its echo rolls over the plains, drifting across rice fields, rooftops, and the long shadows of shrine gates. One by one, horsemen in lacquered armour tighten their saddles, adjust the banners streaming from their backs, and mount their steeds. The festival of Soma Nomaoi has begun—an event so vivid, so steeped in martial heritage, that it feels less like a modern celebration than a portal to Japan’s warrior past.

For over a thousand years, the people of the Soma region have gathered to recreate the battlefield exercises of their ancestors. What began as military training for the Soma clan under their founder, Taira no Kojiro Masakado, has evolved into a grand three-day festival of horse riding, pageantry, and combative spectacle. Today’s festival stretches across the modern city of Minamisoma and its surrounding towns, but its spirit remains defiantly medieval.

Rituals That Echo Across a Millennium

The festival opens on a Saturday morning in late July with solemn Shinto rites held simultaneously at three historic shrines—Ota-jinja, Nakamura-jinja, and Odaka-jinja. In each shrine’s courtyard, armoured warriors kneel before their commanders, cups of ceremonial saké lifted to the sky. The atmosphere is hushed, reverent, electric. A descendant of the Soma clan—still the festival’s supreme commander—offers prayers for victory and safe riding, just as his forebears did centuries earlier.

Then the conch shell sounds.

The warriors rise, mount their horses, and assemble behind their banners—each emblazoned with the crest of a family whose lineage once rode under the lord of Soma. Foot attendants shoulder additional flags and march beside them. The procession moves out like a small army, its colours shimmering in the morning heat, hoofbeats thudding against the earth.

Watching them depart, it is easy to imagine an army riding to war.

The Grand Cavalry March

Sunday brings the festival’s most impressive procession: over 400 mounted samurai parading three kilometres through Minamisoma. Residents, families, and visitors—more than 60,000 in a typical year—line the streets as riders of all ages pass by. Elderly veterans, children just beginning their training, and even a few women now proudly take their place in the ranks.

In 2025, Miwa Hosokawa, age 39, captured one of the festival’s highest honours—the sacred flag in the Shinki-sōdatsusen—after rules restricting women’s participation were finally lifted.

“I’m happy to be able to feel like a human and a horse in one,” she said afterwards, flushed from the victory. “I am overjoyed to be able to participate in Nomaoi again.”

Others, like 31-year-old Ayano Uehara, are just beginning their journey. Though new to riding, she trained specifically so she could join the parade. “Based on this experience, I want to think about what is needed to hand down the traditional event,” she said—a reminder that the festival is as much living culture as it is performance.

The Hippodrome: A Battlefield Reborn

Beyond the city streets lies the heart of the event: a vast, open hippodrome with a 1,000-meter track and a grassy hill where spectators gather. This is where the festival’s martial soul unfurls in thrilling, dust-shaking bursts.

At noon, the Kachū Keiba begins—riders charging at full speed around the track, swords at their sides, armour rattling with every stride. They race bareheaded, banners streaming like comet tails behind them. The spectacle is raw and cinematic, a living echo of cavalry charges from the Warring States era.

When the final riders thunder across the finish line, the field goes quiet for a moment—just long enough for anticipation to take hold.

Nomakake: Wrestling Spirits and Horses

On the festival’s final day, the focus shifts from riders to horses themselves. In Nomakake, mounted samurai herd unsaddled horses into the sacred precincts of Odaka Shrine. Young men in simple white Shinto garments rush forward, attempting to catch the running horses with their bare hands—a task that takes courage, strength, and deep respect for the animals. The first successfully captured horse is offered ceremoniously to the shrine, continuing a tradition older than the samurai era.

A Tradition Tested, and Triumphant

The Soma Nomaoi is more than a festival. After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the region, the event—once cancelled, then held on a reduced scale—became a rallying force for community identity. Residents speak of it not only as heritage, but as proof of their resilience, a show of the same fighting spirit their ancestors carried into battle.

In recent years, the crowds have grown again, with the 2025 festival drawing 35,000 visitors. The armour gleams, the banners fly, the horses run with the same thunderous pride they have for centuries. The people of Soma have preserved their past not as museum artefacts, but as lived experience—something felt in the earth beneath your feet and the roar of hooves in your chest.

A Living Samurai Dream

For martial-arts enthusiasts, practitioners of ninjutsu, and lovers of Japanese tradition, Soma Nomaoi offers something rare: a glimpse of warrior culture not locked behind glass or film, but alive—sweat, dust, steel, and spirit.

Stand on that hill above the hippodrome as the conch sounds. Watch the banners rise. See the cavalry sweep across the fields like a painted scroll come to life.

For a moment, the modern world falls away.

And you, too, are riding into history.