In Toshima Village of the Tokara Islands, there is a unique calendar that celebrates the New Year one month earlier than the mainland, from the eleventh to the twelfth month of the lunar calendar. The *Shichito Shogatsu* (Seven Islands New Year), which welcomes and blesses ancestral spirits (*oyadama*), and the New Year *Hichigee*, where people revere the gods and act with restraint, have been practiced as a pair[2]. On the day of *Hichigee*, it is said that gods visit the island to inspect the people and their homes, so the islanders refrain from going outside or making noise, purify their doorways, and spend the time quietly. It is thought that this time of awe later crystallized into the form of masked visiting gods.

The film *Shichito Shogatsu and Hichigee*, recorded by the Institute of Ethnological Culture in 1998, captures these two New Year rituals remaining on Akusekijima, conveying the unique Tokara worldview of the otherworld where gods and ancestral spirits visit the island alternately[2]. While *Boze* has become famous as a visiting god of the Bon festival, *Hichigee* at the source of the *setsugawari* continues to convey the ancient sensibilities of the southern islands, which revere the 'precarious time' when the boundary between gods and humans thins[1].