Namahage Museum: The Origin of the Word “Namahage”
The roots of the word namahage are in namomi, a term in the Oga dialect that means “heat blisters”; spots or rashes on hands and feet caused by overexposure to heat. Lazy people who spent most of their time inside by the fireplace would develop these blisters. Namomihagi, meanwhile, was the word for the act of removing (more literally, “peeling off”) such signs of idleness. Namomihagi eventually became namahage, and the term came to refer to both the embodied deities themselves and the annual ritual of disciplining idlers, performed in Oga at least since the early nineteenth century.