Gion Matsuri, Kyoto's biggest summer festival

I'd like to share with you what I saw in 2019!

I took this photo at Yasaka Jinja shrine. Three mikoshi, portable shrines, are waiting for their moment to be carried out for the festival.

There is a big happening in Kyoto right now: the Gion Matsuri. It is one of the largest festivals in Japan. It is held every year in central Kyoto and at Yasaka Jinja shrine in Gion, the city’s famed geisha district, and lasts the entire month of July. It’s an iconic feature of the summertime cityscape in Kyoto, and has been for over a thousand years of almost unbroken tradition.

Today, Gion Matsuri is treated as a Shinto festival. But that designation only dates back to the late 19th century. That’s when the Meiji government issued a policy to forcibly separate Shinto and Buddhism. Until that point, for centuries the festival was seen as a form of shinbutsu shugo, a phrase meaning “the mixing of Shinto and Buddhism.” To locals, Shinto kami, Buddhist hotoke deities, and any other divine spirits co-existed in peaceful harmony within Gion Sha shrine, known as Yasaka Jinja today. The Gion Matsuri is a perfect example of Japan’s “hodgepodge” spirituality, in which numerous religious and spiritual traditions are woven seamlessly into the fabric of daily life. 

The Gion Matsuri was inaugurated in 869 to cap off what was, to put it mildly, a very bad period for Japan.

Then-capital Kyoto reeled from epidemics sparked by a growing city that lacked reliable sources of fresh water and sewer systems. Smallpox, flu, measles, and dysentery swept all levels of society; epidemics were so common that even Hikaru Genji, the aristocratic playboy protagonist of The Tale of Genji, spent a chapter of that classic book recovering from malaria. In 864, Mount Fuji erupted for ten days straight.

The natural violence resculpted the mighty peak’s cone, buried nearby lakes and villages with magma, and struck terror into the hearts of people everywhere as the skies blackened from cinder and ash. Five years later came the Jogan Earthquake, a massive tremor that triggered deadly tsunamis and pushed already tenuous urban infrastructure to the breaking point. As disease, terror, and social unrest began to spread, the Imperial authorities knew something had to be done.

In this era before science, disasters were believed the work of angry kami or evil spirits. That anger needed to be appeased. This was the start of the Gion Matsuri. But people didn’t call it that at the time. Instead it was known as a goryo-é, a ceremony to calm angry kami and the spirits of the dead. The citizens of the city have continued to hold it annually, almost without fail, for more than a thousand years.

I went to Kyoto to see the festival for the first time in 2019. When I arrived in the early evening, a passing thundersquall had just drenched the streets, typical weather for the city at that time of year. As the final rays of day sunspoked through rapidly breaking storm clouds over the neighborhood of Shijo Karasuma, the humidity felt thick enough to cut with a knife.

This area has long served as the city’s merchant district. It’s a popular destination today, normally filled with shops and boutiques frequented by tourists and locals alike. But festival days are anything but normal days. There was no sign of the usual cars, taxis, and buses that ran through the area, and the streets were closed off and turned into what Japanese colloquially call a “pedestrian’s paradise.” Tens of thousands of people had packed into the streets of the neighborhood.

The further I pushed my way inside the crowd, the denser it grew. There’s an idiom for this: sushizume, packed in like sushi in a box. Nobody here seemed to mind. Many were dressed in festive yukata robes or traditional kimono, and the sweet scent of beer and saké and yakitori skewers, redolent of sugar and umami, filled the air. So too did the sound of music, a droning flute, drum, and cymbal melody known by its onomatopoeia: kontiki-tin. Here is the video.

Tsuki-hoko, the “Moonspear”, was my favorite.

The climax of the Gion Matsuri is a parade of thirty-three elaborate floats going through the streets on a day time, cheered on by huge crowds. The floats are massive , wheeled structures called “Yamaboko,” so named because there are two types: Yama (mountain) and Hoko (spear).

Each is painstakingly constructed by local neighborhood groups who participate in the festival every year, then disassembled for storage after. The Hoko are particularly enormous, towering up to 25 meters, moving buildings rolled through the streets by throngs of white-clad revelers who pull them with thick ropes. Inside each are multiple floors housing musical performers and dancers; the outsides are gloriously decorated with glowing walls of paper lanterns and treasures from each neighborhood.

One of the most striking is the Kanko-hoko float, named for the borough of Kanko that supports it every year. Its treasure is a replica of a Christian tapestry gifted from Belgium to the Shogun in the 16^th century. Somehow the original, now too frail to parade and held by a local museum, survived later Shoguns’ campaigns against Christianity. Perhaps its motif of a woman fetching water was neutral enough to be interpreted as secular in nature.

Other floats feature more obvious domestic religious iconography. The Tsuki-hoko (“Moonspear”) venerates the Kami of the moon, born from Izanagi when he washed the impurities of the underworld off of his body in Japan’s foundational myth. Running your eyes over the visual feast of elaborate decorations, many centuries old, it’s easy to see why locals call the floats “moving museums.”

”Heave ho!” Each float weighs about ten tons.

So incredible to see a massive float making a sharp turn to enter a side street.

The irony is that this festival, first started to curb an epidemic in 869 A.D., was canceled by the arrival of Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021. When I visited Kyoto I knew that the festival was created to help quell the fear of plague. But I had no idea, in 2019, that all of us would soon be coming face to face with a plague ourselves, just like our ancestors had in generations past.

What’s interesting is, nobody has ever, in times of old or today, questioned the legitimacy of the festival – like, what is the point of holding an anti-plague festival even though plagues keep coming? We have vaccines and masks, why pray to the gods?

The reason why nobody asks this is because this isn't the point. The festival is designed to foster a sense of community and belonging: epidemics come and go, but we’re all in this together. COVID-19 taught all of us how relevant the festival was, even a thousand years later. And that first re-convening of the festival in 2022 reminded us of how much we need each other, having been locked away in our homes, deprived of contact and community and all the fun that comes with it.

This year, more than 250,000 people showed up to see the evening festival before the parade of the floats. I’d call that a sign of health and prosperity!

I had cold somen noodles to cool myself off!