Matsuri of the West

About this book

Western Japan is a country of seas — and its festivals keep time by water, islands and the old lunar calendar. Two hundred festivals of Chugoku, Shikoku, Kyushu and Okinawa, and nowhere else, in one uniform, practical format: 55 from Chugoku, 45 from Shikoku, 80 from Kyushu and 20 from Okinawa & the Southern Islands. Every entry gives the typical window, the place, the festival inside the life of its land, and how to plan around it.

The giants are here — Hakata's Yamakasa sprinting through the dawn streets, Nagasaki Kunchi's dance towns, Tokushima's Awa Odori filling a city with drums, Kochi's Yosakoi, a hundred thousand hands on the rope at Naha. But this book goes where the "best festivals" lists stop: a national championship fought in the mud of a tidal flat at Kashima, demons chasing children through the lanes of Onomichi, a festival for the sea turtles who nest on one small Shikoku beach, monks' puppets and lantern dolls, villages in the mountains of Takachiho dancing their gods through the winter night, and Okinawa's island rites that still run on the lunar calendar — each one marked, with the conversion habit you need, because their dates drift by weeks between years. Every window is given honestly as the typical year, and every entry carries its check date.

Third and final volume of the regional deep-dive series, companion to Matsuri: The Complete Guide to 500 Japanese Festivals (the nationwide doorway, organised by month), Matsuri of the North (Tohoku & Hokkaido, Vol. 1) and Matsuri of Central Japan (Kanto, Chubu & Kansai, Vol. 2). Where a festival appears in more than one volume, it is written here from the land and the life around it, never copied across.