Tenno Festival at Tsushima Shrine

Tsushima Shrine's Tennō Festival: Lantern Boats and a 500-Year River Pageant

On the fourth Saturday of July, as dusk falls over the city of Tsushima in western Aichi, five wooden barges drift onto the still water of Maru-ike pond, each one fitted with a tall central mast and a half-dome of more than three hundred paper lanterns. The lights are kindled in sequence in a ritual called nyoi-tenka, and the reflected glow ripples across the pond until the boats look more like floating mountains of fire than vessels. This is the opening night of the Tennō Festival, a summer rite of Tsushima Shrine whose recorded history reaches back at least to the early sixteenth century.

The festival is held jointly by Tsushima Shrine and the surrounding communities of Tsushima and Aisai cities. Although the calendar dates have shifted from the old lunar sixth month to a fixed July weekend, the structure of the two-day climax has remained recognisable for generations: a contemplative yoi-matsuri on Saturday evening, and a bright, athletic asa-matsuri on Sunday morning.

Why It Was Selected as a Cultural Property

The Tennō Festival was placed on the national register of intangible folk cultural properties requiring documentation in March 1967, under the name Tsushima-jinja no Tennō-sai. The Aichi Prefectural Board of Education prepared a detailed survey report the following year. In January 1980 the central ceremony was upgraded to Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property status, designated as Owari Tsushima Tennō-sai no Danjiri-bune Gyōji, "the float-boat events of the Owari Tsushima Tennō Festival." On 1 December 2016 it was further inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, included among thirty-three Japanese yama-hoko-yatai float festivals.

What gives the rite its scholarly value is the survival of an unusually complete ensemble of practices around the float-boats: the construction techniques for the lantern frames, the music played on board, the costuming of figures based on Noh plays, and the choreography of young men carrying cloth halberds. The earliest surviving record, sometimes called the Taisai Ikadaba-guruma Kiroku, mentions ornamental figures on the float-boats as far back as 1522, which suggests the festival was already a mature urban spectacle in the late Muromachi period.

The Two Nights and Their Atmosphere

The evening festival is the meditative half. Each makiwara-bune is built by lashing two flat-bottomed boats together side by side and raising a central pillar called the shinbashira. Twelve lanterns are hung on the pillar to represent the twelve months of the year; three hundred and sixty-five more are arranged in a great half-arc around it, one for each day. The flotilla of five boats drifts slowly across the pond, accompanied by the high, breathy melody of the Tsushima flute. There are no fireworks here, no shouted slogans, only the slow geometry of fire on water.

The morning festival is the festival's day of action. A sixth boat called the Ichie-guruma joins from the Saya district of neighbouring Aisai City, taking the lead position. Each of the six boats carries an effigy on its uppermost platform, costumed as a character from a particular Noh play; the lead Tsushima boat always carries a Takasago figure, while the other four rotate through the repertoire from year to year. As the procession nears the shore, ten young men in loincloths stand on the prow of the Ichie-guruma. One after another they leap into the water, swim ashore carrying cloth halberds called nuno-hoko, and run barefoot along the avenue to the shrine, where the halberds are offered at the inner sanctuary.

Before you go, it helps to know that the present stage of the festival is a vestige of a much larger river. The Tennō River once ran broad enough to be spanned by a long wooden bridge from which, by local tradition, Oda Nobunaga is said to have watched the festival as a young lord of the nearby Shōbata Castle. Successive flood-control works closed the river off; what remains is the oval pond of Maru-ike inside Tennōgawa Park, and the lantern-boats now turn within an enclosed basin rather than navigating an open channel.

Planning Your Visit

The two main nights take place at Tennōgawa Park, a fifteen-minute walk from Tsushima Station on the Meitetsu Tsushima Line, itself about half an hour by limited express from Meitetsu Nagoya Station. There is no parking on site during the festival, and traffic restrictions cover most of the surrounding streets, so trains are essentially the only practical approach. The shore around Maru-ike is densely packed with paid sajiki stands sold in advance through the Tsushima City Tourist Association; arriving without a ticket means securing a spot along the embankment, sometimes several hours before the lanterns are lit at around 6:30 p.m.

The morning festival begins around 9:00 a.m. and is considerably easier to view than the evening; the daylight makes the painted boats, the Noh costumes and the swimmers' run to the shrine visible from almost any position. Visitors who can only manage one day often find the morning the more memorable, although it lacks the lantern imagery that defines the festival in photographs.

Tsushima Shrine itself is worth time in its own right. The main hall, donated in 1605 by Matsudaira Tadayoshi (the fourth son of Tokugawa Ieyasu), is an Important Cultural Property, and the rōmon gate was a donation from Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1591. The shrine's older identity as Tsushima Gozu-Tennō-sha — the head shrine of roughly three thousand Tennō-faith branches across Japan — explains why the name Tennō attaches to both the river and the festival, even after the Meiji-era separation of Buddhist and Shinto elements stripped the Gozu-Tennō name from formal records.

Around Tsushima

The city is compact and pleasant for slow walking. The streets immediately north of the shrine preserve a number of Edo-period merchant houses, including the Hotta Family Residence with its distinctive Owari-style frontage. The Tsushima Tourist Exchange Centre, a converted prewar bank building, makes a useful first stop for maps and small exhibits on the festival's history. Spring visitors may want to combine a trip with the Owari Tsushima Wisteria Festival, held at the same Tennōgawa Park in late April and early May, when the long racemes of the trellised wisteria provide a softer, daylit counterpart to the summer lantern boats.