Matsuri

About this book

Best-12 lists vs 500 festivals. The blog posts give you twelve festivals a month and a collector's photo book won't even tell you how many it holds. This guide covers 500 — every month, every region, all 47 prefectures of Japan — in one uniform, travel-ready format.

From Kyoto's Gion Matsuri, a month of towering floats, to a straw-sandal procession in Fukushima; from Sapporo's snow statues to the dawn sprint of Fukuoka's Yamakasa; from fireworks competitions where master pyrotechnicians stake their reputations on a single shell to neighbourhood festivals no other English book has ever listed — each of the 500 entries gives you the same practical fields: the season, the place, the type, the way in (nearest station where recorded, official site where published), and honest notes on crowds, weather and etiquette.

Inside: twelve monthly chapters that work as a year-round calendar; a complete regional index for when the destination is decided before the date; a field guide to festival types (mikoshi, floats, dances, fireworks, fire festivals, Tanabata, snow festivals); a planning chapter on building a trip around a festival; and individual notes on some thirty of Japan's most famous festivals, from the Aoi Matsuri's silent Heian procession to Chichibu's night floats under winter fireworks.

Every festival was checked against public records — the publisher's own 793-festival registry, built from Wikidata (CC0) and official sources; the 500 deepest-documented are here. Dates are given by season and month — the stable facts — with the official source for each year's exact days, because a map owes you honesty about what moves and what does not.

Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.