Matsuri of the North

About this book

The north of Japan celebrates hardest because its year is hardest — five months of snow, a summer that must hold everything, and a sea that gives and takes. Two hundred festivals of Tohoku and Hokkaido, and nowhere else, in one uniform, practical format: 50 from Hokkaido and 25 each from Aomori, Iwate, Miyagi, Akita, Yamagata and Fukushima. 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 — Nebuta's paper warriors, the Kanto lantern poles balanced on foreheads, Sendai's Tanabata streamers, the Hanagasa flower-hat dance, Sapporo's snow city, and four hundred armoured horsemen at Soma Nomaoi. But this book goes where the "best festivals" lists stop: snow-hut shrines you sit inside at Yokote, ogre gods visiting homes on the Oga Peninsula, salmon thanks in a village named Salmon River, a candy market eaten as medicine, drift-ice festivals on the Okhotsk coast, human shogi under the blossom, and harbour festivals in towns of a few hundred people where the whole village is either performing or cooking. Every window is given honestly as the typical year, and every entry carries its check date — because northern festivals move with snow, sea and harvest, and a good guide says so.

Companion to Matsuri: The Complete Guide to 500 Japanese Festivals — the nationwide doorway, organised by month. That book covers all of Japan; this one — the first volume of the regional deep-dive series — covers only the north, and covers it in depth: the same festival, where the two books meet, is written here from the land and the life around it, never copied across.