Takayama Matsuri

One name, two festivals

Takayama Matsuri is really two festivals, six months apart, in the old castle town of Takayama in Gifu Prefecture. In spring, Sanno Matsuri honours the kami of Hie Shrine, south of the historic old town. In autumn, Hachiman Matsuri belongs to Sakurayama Hachiman Shrine to the northeast. Each has its own shrine and its own floats, and the neighbourhoods are divided by the Yasugawa-dori street: those to the south take part in spring, those to the north in autumn. Townspeople in traditional dress and shishi-odori lion dancers parade through the streets.

The yatai

The floats, called yatai, are what people come to see: twelve appear in the spring festival and eleven in the autumn, and they are not the same floats. Ornately decorated, they are designated an Important Tangible Folk Cultural Property of Japan, and the festival is on UNESCO’s Representative List as one of the Yama, Hoko and Yatai float festivals.

On the evening of the first day the yatai are hung with hundreds of lanterns and drawn slowly through the old town.

Kept by the neighbourhoods

The floats belong to the neighbourhoods that keep them, not to the shrines. Floats first appear in written records in connection with the autumn festival in 1718, and the society that looks after them places the festival’s beginnings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Keeping them in repair and bringing them out on the same days every April and October is work the neighbourhoods do themselves.