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[title]Instead of the usual four, it’s more accurate to say that Tokyo actually has six seasons. That’s because both the weather and people’s activities change noticeably in the capital every two months. This series, which here kicks off with summer (July and August), will see me delving deeper into all six seasons over the coming year.
In the northern hemisphere, especially in North America and central Europe, summer starts in June and runs until August, when the first signs of autumn can already be felt in the air – and in the tired demeanour of hotel and restaurant employees in resort towns everywhere.
In Tokyo, on the other hand, the onset of summer comes with the end of rainy season in July and is always accompanied by suffocatingly hot weather. This heat lasts throughout August and into the first half of September, when city-dwellers can finally start looking forward to cooler days.
With such steamy conditions come incessant warnings of heatstroke and constant chit-chat about how unbearable the weather is, as if summer was an all-round despicable time of the year. But for me, these two months are a time when the blue sky, clouds and lush greenery make it seem as if the city is bursting with energy.
Urban versus rural festivals
That energy is also why so many of Edo-Tokyo’s great traditional festivals or matsuri take place in summer. These multi-day celebrations see portable mikoshi shrines carried around neighbourhoods, participants splashed with water and countless onlookers drawn into the intoxicating atmosphere. The yukata may be the summer uniform of choice for most Tokyoites, but at festivals you can also spot some brave souls sporting only fundoshi loincloths – a true sign of summer.
The so-called three great festivals of Tokyo – the Kanda, Sanno and Fukagawa festivals – take place in mid-May, mid-June and mid-August respectively. You might think my ‘summer equals festivals’ argument falls apart then, as only the Fukagawa matsuri is actually held during this season. But there’s a logic here – let me explain.
Before the modern era, Japan was largely an agricultural nation. This meant that village festivals, which were usually small in scale, were held in autumn to celebrate the harvest. I was born and raised in Setagaya, which is now part of Tokyo but used to be rural piece of land on the Musashino plain – far from Edo Castle (today’s Imperial Palace) – where festivals were traditionally local shrine celebrations held from late September to October.
Urban festivals, on the other hand, were entertainment for city-dwellers, merchants and craftspeople, who didn’t adhere to the agricultural calendar. The exact dates of shrine festivals depended on the origins and characteristics of each shrine’s deity, but it was always considered a good thing to parade the shrine mikoshi – in which the deity is thought to reside – at the most energetic time of the year.
In other words, festivals are best held when people can go wild and make a scene. The aim of showing off one’s energy to the deity is also why festival participants wear skimpy clothing instead of elaborate dress – which consequently makes summer the ideal matsuri season.
Scheduling specifics
Originally held in mid-September under the old lunar calendar (around mid-October in today’s terms), the Kanda Matsuri was at some point moved to mid-May. This was probably because the weather in May reminds people of summer’s energy and feelings of freedom, so holding the festival then would function as a cue that the hot season was just around the corner.
Another likely reason for this timing was that it would avoid a scheduling conflict with June’s Sanno Matsuri, another great Edo festival. The Sanno originally took place in mid-June under the lunar calendar, which in modern parlance corresponds to high summer in July.
The Fukagawa Matsuri used to be held in what is now mid-September, but was relocated to mid-August with the adoption of the Gregorian calendar. This was actually a rather smart move, as drenching the mikoshi-carriers with water is a central feature of this festival – and one that is of course most compatible with the hottest time of the year.
The crux of this conversation is that matsuri are all about releasing energy and channelling that energy into mikoshi parades and other ceremonies. Because of this, most major city festivals elsewhere in Japan – Kyoto’s Gion Matsuri, the Tenjin Matsuri in Osaka and Fukuoka’s Hakata Yamakasa – also take place in summer, when the season’s abundant energy and urban vitality come together as one.
The social connection
Interestingly, as these power-packed festivals draw on urban vigour, they reflect social currents and change even more than they do natural phenomena such as the changing of the seasons. Historically, both the Kanda and Sanno festivals symbolised and enjoyed the patronage of the Edo shogunate, so they suffered significantly once the power of that government waned in the decades before the Meiji Restoration.
The Sanno Matsuri lost its vigour completely in the late Edo era, when the last two Tokugawa shoguns left the capital for Kyoto, and only barely survived disasters such as the Great Kanto Earthquake and World War II. Even traffic-related changes such as the increase in cars and the intensification of tram traffic in Tokyo hit the festival’s float parade hard, and many thought the tradition would be lost altogether.
However, as Japan’s economy recovered after the war, the matsuri experienced similarly explosive growth. Destroyed shrines were rebuilt, the mikoshi were restored and competition among the various festivals reached fever pitch. The largest of the Fukagawa Matsuri’s mikoshi, a shiny golden one built in 1991, even proved too heavy to carry and could only be enshrined once. So instead of relying on this 4.5-tonne monster, the organisers quickly decided to build a smaller mikoshi (that still weighs two tonnes!) to replace it – something that was only possible at the height of the bubble era.
However, we can hardly be sure that Tokyo’s festivals will continue to prosper endlessly. Participant numbers are dropping and the organisers are growing old. I’ve heard that this is also becoming an acute problem at Teppozu Inari, the shrine closest to my workplace in Higashi-Ginza. In other words, Tokyo’s matsuri are far from immune to the issues facing Japanese society as a whole.
Will the matsuri wither?
The Fukagawa Matsuri is only celebrated in all its glory once every three years, and 2017 is such a year. That, and the stunning rise in tourist numbers over the past few years, means that crowding is likely to be extreme. On the other hand, such developments are hardly new: Tokyo’s matsuri have been both local religious events and tourist attractions since the Edo era. In fact, the festival of 1807 saw so many onlookers squeeze onto the streets that nearby Eitaibashi bridge collapsed, killing over 1,400 people.
While the head count of mikoshi-carriers is decreasing every year, Tokyo’s three great festivals continue to see rapid growth in spectator numbers. But without eager participants, onlookers have nothing to see. So why not recruit carriers from the tourist hordes?
Sure, they need to accept the happi coat and loincloth dress code enforced by matsuri organisers, but that can’t be a deal-breaker for every single one of the more than 20 million tourists Japan now attracts annually. Nothing would make me happier than seeing some of them pull on a fundoshi and ensure that the matsuri show goes on.
Takeo Funabiki
Cultural anthropologist
1948, born in Tokyo
1972, BA, University of Tokyo, Faculty of Liberal Arts
1982, PhD in anthropology, Cambridge University, Graduate School of Social Anthropology
1983, University of Tokyo, College of Arts and Sciences, lecturer
1994, Professor
1996, University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, professor
2012, retired from the Graduate School, Professor Emeritus
Field work conducted in Hawaii, Tahiti, Japan (Yamagata Shonaiheiya), East Asia (China, Korea) and Melanesia/Polynesia (Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea). Professional interests include 1) mechanism of mutual interference of human culture and nature, 2) the representations of ritual and theatre, and 3) changes in culture and society that occur during the course of modernisation.