Japan

Volume II of this archive is Japan. It has a first set of entries behind it and work on it is paused for now, because the next useful step is finding sources rather than writing more entries. What is published below is the beginning of a volume, not a survey of one. What follows is orientation — how dates work here, what the record is built from, and what this volume does not intend to cover.

Public life runs on the Gregorian calendar, which makes Japan unusual among the places this archive covers: most dates here are simply dates. But not all of the national holidays are. Four of them are defined as the second or third Monday of their month rather than as a date, and two — Vernal Equinox Day and Autumnal Equinox Day — are defined in the Act on National Holidays only as the day of the equinox, with no date given at all.

Those two are worth understanding before you plan around them. The day is computed by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and published in the Official Gazette in February of the year before. So it can be calculated for any year you like, and it is not official until that February. The archive stores both facts rather than choosing between them: a date it has computed and a date the gazette has fixed are shown differently, because they are different things.

Festivals are a separate matter from holidays, and a much larger one. Japan protects them through its own system: the Agency for Cultural Affairs designates Folk Cultural Properties, a category that explicitly covers annual events, folk performing arts and customs, and documents those judged to be at risk. Above that sit the Japanese elements inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity — among them the Yama, Hoko and Yatai float festivals, the Furyū-odori ritual dances, and Raihō-shin, the ritual visits of deities in masks and costumes. This volume starts there, because those designations come with documentation a claim can rest on.

What it will not attempt, at least not soon: the very large number of local festivals held by one neighbourhood or one shrine, with no published record outside the memory of the people who keep them; and anything dated by the old lunisolar calendar, which this archive’s date engine does not implement. Absence here means not yet sourced. It does not mean unimportant, and it never means the archive checked and found nothing.

On conduct, this page defers rather than generalises. The Japan Tourism Agency publishes its own guidance for visitors — on crowding, on waste, and on behaviour at temples, shrines and historical sites — and a national position from the body responsible for it is a better starting point than anything the archive could infer. Etiquette specific to a particular festival belongs on that festival’s entry, and where the archive does not know what is expected of a visitor, it records that as unknown rather than leaving the field blank.

This is not a survey of what is practised in Japan, and it is not close to being one. Read what is here as a start rather than as a shortlist — the entries were chosen for what could be sourced and dated honestly, not for what matters most.