Japan's Float Festivals & Processions

About this book

Every Japanese festival is, at its heart, a vehicle. The god does not stay in the shrine — the god is carried: on a gilded portable shrine borne by a hundred neighbours, on a wheeled stage of carving and brocade hauled by rope teams, on a twenty-metre tower of paper and light.

Japan's Float Festivals & Processions is the first English guide to read 200 of Japan's great festivals through their transport — the dashi float, the mikoshi, and the procession itself, treated as the moving works of art and engineering they are. Tour the paper giants of Tohoku, Tokyo's mikoshi capitals, Kyoto's Gion and the danjiri coast, the mountain-float towns and the Noto giants, and the racing shrines of the west. Then take the float apart — wheels, carving, dolls, textiles, music, timber — and finish with a practical companion on where to stand, how the great corner-turns are made, and how to join in.

Every entry gives the region, the place, the season and the type, two full paragraphs of account, and a checked Good to Know note for the traveller. Written and produced in Japan by Aki Wakamatsu.

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.