Japan is a land of festivals. Not only are there numerous festivals based on age-old traditions, there are also many newer theme festivals such as yukata festivals, and hardly a day passes without some sort of festival somewhere.

Japanese festivals originally centered on agrarian rituals such as spring prayers for bountiful rice crops and autumn harvest celebrations. These were later joined by the urban summer festivals for driving away evil spirits and plagues. All of these festivals were intended to placate the gods and ensure the community's continuing solidarity and prosperity, and it was not until the Edo period that festivals began to be popularized as diversions from everyday life. In recent decades, and especially since the end of the war, festivals have grown even more devoid of meaning, and many now exist mainly as tourist attractions.

Nebuta Festival (Aomori)

This celebration of summer takes place from the evening of August through August 7. Enormous floats depicting famous warrior-heroes from ancient China or famous Japanese samurai such as Katou Kiyomasa are lit from within so that they glow as they are paraded throughout the city and, at the end of the festival, set adrift on the sea. This closing ceremony, called nebuta-nagasaki, symbolizes the dispelling of sleep in order to usher in the bon season when ancestral spirits are welcomed and entertained.






Sanja Matsuri (Toukyou Tokyo)

This festival began as a parade to herald the arrival of summer. Every May 17-18, scores of mikoshi are carried through the streets to Asakusa Shrine, accompanied by binzasara percussion instruments that set the beat for a wild dance called Binzasara no Mai. Held in the traditionally working-class shitamachi part of Toukyou, the Sanja Matsuri has a very plebeian mood.