Festivals

In a 14th-century essay called Tsurezuregusa, the priest Yoshida Kenkō wrote that the moment a country reveals itself most plainly […]

Around 657 CE, in the court of Empress Saimei, Buddhist monks held a strange new ceremony for the dead. Lanterns

Picture a bamboo pole twelve metres tall, hung with forty-six paper lanterns, weighing fifty kilograms when lit, and held in

The first time I saw a karakuri doll on a Takayama yatai, the thing that stopped me cold was that

At ten o’clock on the third Saturday night of February, the lights inside the Main Hall of Saidai-ji Kannon-in go

The chant goes “Odoru aho ni miru aho, onaji aho nara odoranya son son” and a fair English rendering is:

On October 21, 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu won the Battle of Sekigahara and effectively became the most powerful man in Japan.

Once a year, on the seventh night of the seventh month, two stars are supposed to meet across the Milky

Roughly 100 mikoshi from 44 different town associations in Asakusa pour into the streets over a single weekend in May,

The first thing nobody tells you about Aomori Nebuta Matsuri is that the chant means almost nothing. For six August