Folk art of some rice-planting festivals as a memorial service for cattle has been handed down in northeastern part of Hiroshima Prefecture. This is a festival in which many village people transplant rice seedlings with music after making a memorial service for cattle playing an important fole in farming.
The rice-planting festivals have been held vigorously since the middle ages, but they were exclusively for rice-planting concentratedly in landowners' paddy fields. In the middle ages, compulsory labor was levied as a kind of tax. In early modern ages for transplanting rice seedlings in several hectares of a big landowners' paddy fields a day, festive rice-planting work was conducted in such a way as many tenant famers and other farm laborers were collected to carry out the work more efficiently by playing music and singing songs. It seems that music was used not for pleasure but as a means to achieve a certain level of work efficiency.
In the festive rice planting at present, a large part of the work is done by machines and it is held exclusively for the purpose of folk art.