Every July 10, carpenters in central Kyoto start building the floats for the Gion Matsuri in the street, and they don’t use a single nail. The towering wooden frames of the yamaboko are lashed together with straw rope, a technique called nawa-garami, and four days later all 23 floats for the first procession are standing. After the festival they come apart again. Next year, the whole thing starts over.
That’s the part of Japan’s festivals that rarely makes the travel lists. The crowds and the food stalls are real. But underneath them is a working craft economy of carpenters, weavers, lantern builders and puppeteers who keep these objects alive, mostly by hand, mostly for one or two days a year. In 2016 UNESCO inscribed 33 of these float festivals, from 18 prefectures, as a single entry on its intangible heritage list called Yama, Hoko, Yatai. Three of them show the range.
Kyoto’s Gion Matsuri: a museum on wheels
The festival dates its origins to 869, when a plague in the capital was blamed on angry spirits and a purification rite was ordered to calm them. More than eleven centuries later the yamaboko still lead it. There are two kinds. The hoko are the tall ones, with a spear-like pole rising from the roof. The yama are smaller and carry tableaux. On July 17, the Saki Matsuri, 23 of them roll out with the Naginata Hoko in front, and on July 24, the Ato Matsuri, another 11 follow.
They have no steering. To turn a corner, teams lay split bamboo on the road, soak it with water and haul on ropes until the wheels skid sideways through ninety degrees. It’s called tsujimawashi, and it is slow, loud and nerve-racking to watch!
Then look at what’s hanging off the sides. Kyoto’s merchants decorated their floats with textiles from Nishijin, the city’s own weaving district, and with whatever the trade routes brought in. The best story belongs to the Koi Yama, which rolls on July 24. Its curtains were cut from a 16th century tapestry woven in what is now Belgium. Two tapestries believed to belong to the same Trojan War series hang today in the Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania, in Vilnius. One theory is that the cloth came to Japan as a papal gift to Hasekura Tsunenaga’s embassy to Rome in the 1610s. Nobody knows for sure, or when it was first cut up for a float. The pieces you see in the street are replicas. The originals are kept indoors.
Aomori’s Nebuta: paper, wire and a year of work
At the other end of the country, the Aomori Nebuta Matsuri runs August 2 to 7, and its floats are lanterns. Huge ones. Each nebuta is designed to fit a space about 9 meters wide, 7 meters deep and 5 meters high, and a finished float weighs around four tons. Roughly 23 large floats are made every year, and every one is new.
The form has changed under the makers’ hands. Early nebuta were washi paper over bamboo, lit by candles, which is about as flammable as an object can get. The frames moved to wire, the candles to bulbs, and now to LEDs, up to a thousand in a single float. What hasn’t changed is the paper, or the order of work. A nebuta-shi, the float’s designer, settles a theme (often a warrior or a scene from a myth), and finishes the pencil drawing around New Year. Building starts in May in big tents by the harbor. Then the ink lines go on, then wax to hold the patterns, then paint and dye.
Only seven people have ever held the title of Nebuta Master. The most recent, Hiroo Takenami, was named in 2023 at 63, and he still draws every ink line on his floats himself. The full cycle from idea to street takes about a year, so planning for the next one starts before the current festival ends. If you can’t be there in August, the Nebuta Museum WA RASSE, open since 2011, keeps full-size nebuta lit indoors all year. And anyone in the proper haneto costume can join the dancers on the route.
Takayama: the craft you can see up close
Takayama, in the mountains of Gifu, holds its festival twice. The spring Sanno Matsuri at Hie Shrine is April 14 and 15, with 12 yatai. The autumn Hachiman Matsuri at Sakurayama Hachimangu is October 9 and 10, with 11. The floats were developed in the late Edo period and every one of them is designated an Important Tangible Folk Cultural Property, which tells you how seriously the carving, lacquer, gilding and metalwork are taken.
Our favorite thing here is small. On the Hoteitai float, karakuri puppets perform during the autumn festival, worked by nine puppeteers pulling 36 cords. The springs inside are made from right whale baleen, and as far as the record shows, nothing modern has been found that behaves the same way. It’s a clockwork performance with no clockwork in it! On the first evening of each festival the yatai are hung with lanterns, around a hundred apiece, and pulled through the old town in the dark. Outside festival days, four of the autumn floats live in the Takayama Matsuri Yatai Kaikan, so you can get close enough to see the tool marks.
One caution on festival histories in general. Origin stories here get repeated until they feel like fact. Tokushima’s Awa Odori, the big August dance festival, is often said to date to a drunken party for the opening of Tokushima Castle in 1586. A local historian traced that tale to a 1908 newspaper article with no earlier evidence. The festival is old either way. The neat date is probably invented.
For more Japanese craft that keeps going because someone keeps doing it, see our look at the five oldest companies in the world, all of them Japanese, or this lantern candle that changes its light as it burns. Terms like washi and lacquer get fuller treatment in our glossary of visual culture.
