Chichibu Yomatsuri

Chichibu Yomatsuri (秩父夜祭) is the annual festival of Chichibu Shrine in the town of Chichibu in Saitama. It is held every year on 2 and 3 December: the 2nd is the eve, yoimiya (宵宮), and the 3rd is the main day. Its name means “night festival,” and on the 3rd the floats move after dark, hung with lanterns, with fireworks in the cold winter sky.

Six floats are pulled: two kasaboko (笠鉾), with tall canopies, and four yatai (屋台). On the eve, the two kasaboko and four yatai appear; on the main day, all six take part. The climax is the haul up Dango-zaka (団子坂), where floats weighing as much as twenty tonnes are pulled up the slope. The yatai also carry kabuki performances.

The festival now falls on a fixed December date, but it did not always. Shrine records say it was formerly held on the third day of the eleventh month of the old lunisolar calendar, and that 3 December is the current date rather than the original one. If you find older accounts giving a different day, that is why.

It is designated nationally as both a tangible and an intangible Important Folk Cultural Property: the floats and the event. It is also inscribed as UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. The town counts it with Kyoto’s Gion Matsuri and Takayama Matsuri as one of Japan’s three great float festivals; the archive has entries for the other two.

The festival is the shrine’s own annual rite, and the floats are the town’s. What is unusual about it is not the floats themselves — Gion and Takayama have those — but when it happens: December, at night, in the cold, in a mountain basin, with fireworks. A festival that could have been moved to a comfortable month and was not.

It also carries a visible piece of its own history. The date was once set by the old lunisolar calendar and is now a fixed December day, which is the kind of change that usually disappears from the telling. Here the shrine still records it.