Tsuchizaki Shinmeisha Shrine Festival Float Procession

A Port Festival Rebuilt From Scratch Every Summer

The Tsuchizaki Shinmeisha Festival float procession takes place on July 20 and 21 each year in the Tsuchizaki port district, in the northern part of Akita City. It was designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property of Japan on December 15, 1997, and in 2016 it was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List as one of the thirty-three "Yama, Hoko and Yatai float festivals in Japan."

What sets the festival apart is easy to overlook until someone explains it: the floats do not survive from year to year. Each hikiyama is assembled fresh by its neighborhood in mid-July, hauled through the streets for two days, and then taken apart on the 22nd. Building the float, pulling it, and dismantling it are all considered part of the same observance. The procession a visitor watches in any given July has, in a literal sense, never existed before and will never exist again.

Locally the event goes by several names. Older Akita residents simply call it "the Tsuchizaki festival," while the common nicknames are Minato Matsuri (Port Festival) and Tsuchizaki Minato Hikiyama Matsuri. In Tsuchizaki itself the float is rarely called a hikiyama; people just say yama, "mountain."

A Festival the Sea Built

Tsuchizaki was a working harbor long before it was a festival town. The port appears in the medieval shipping register Kaisen Shikimoku as one of the Seven Ports of the North, the trading anchorages that linked the Sea of Japan coast. When the Satake clan entered the region in 1602 and soon moved their seat inland to Kubota Castle, the town briefly declined, then recovered as the harbor that served the new castle.

The shrine at the center of the festival, Tsuchizaki Shinmeisha, stands on the former main bailey of Minato Castle. It is the tutelary shrine of the port's many neighborhoods. The festival grew out of the shrine's annual rite: sailors passing through the harbor donated a portable shrine, or mikoshi, and the procession that followed is generally traced to 1705. By that reckoning the observance has carried on for more than three centuries.

Two details hint at how thoroughly the sea shaped the event. The oldest surviving description of the floats comes from a 1789 travel account that records around forty being pulled through the streets. And the aiya-bushi melody played during the night procession is said to descend from haiya-bushi, a song carried north along the coast aboard the kitamaebune cargo ships that once made Tsuchizaki prosperous.

Why the Festival Was Recognized

The 1997 designation rests on a single official criterion: that the event shows, in its origins and content, typical features of the fundamental living culture of the Japanese people. The festival qualified as a large-scale port observance accompanied by a wide range of rituals and retaining strong elements of furyū, the older Japanese tradition of elaborate, competitive display.

Cultural authorities also valued it as a record of how Japanese festival floats developed over time. Because the floats are rebuilt annually rather than preserved, each year's procession reflects current craft, current materials, and current taste, while still following inherited rules. The festival is, in effect, a living survey of float-making rather than a museum of finished objects.

The body responsible for safeguarding the tradition is the Tsuchizaki Shinmeisha Hōsankai, the federation of the shrine's parishioner neighborhoods. The full scope of the designation is broader than the two festival days alone. It covers the entire sequence, from the purification rites that begin on July 1 through the neighborhood preparation work, the building of the floats, and the dismantling that closes the cycle.

Reading a Float

A Tsuchizaki float is built on a wheeled base framed in zelkova wood, the neighborhood's name carved into its side. The wheels and axles are wooden, and the haulers feed them a mixture of light oil and cooking oil to keep them turning. The result is a slow, groaning creak and a distinct smell that announces a float before it comes into view.

The front two-thirds of the platform carries the spectacle. A craggy artificial mountain is shaped over a frame using navy cotton cloth, then dressed with live cedar and pine branches and sprigs of Japanese yew. A pair of "married rocks," one male and one female, stands at the center, often with a waterfall running between them and spray modeled at the base. On the stage in front, warrior dolls act out a battle scene from history. A tall placard, the gedai, names the scene, and smaller placards identify each figure.

The rear third is a different world. Here a boxed tower holds the musicians, ringed by red lanterns. Above it sits the mikaeshi, a satirical doll paired with a verse in seven-five meter that comments, often sharply, on the year's news. Neighborhoods compete for a prize for the wittiest mikaeshi, and winners display a token of the award beside it.

Height is governed by the city's power lines. Floats are generally built around a five-meter rock and capped at 4.7 meters so they can pass beneath the cables. It was not always so. In 1878 the English traveler Isabella Bird saw Tsuchizaki floats and estimated some at close to fifty feet. As electric wiring spread, the floats had to come down to their present scale.

The Two Days, Hour by Hour

July 20 is the yoimiya, the eve. Each float must first circle its own neighborhood, an act believed to sweep away local misfortune, before heading to the shrine for a purification blessing. Since 2006, after the shrine gate was raised during roadworks near Tsuchizaki Station, floats have been able to roll directly into the shrine precinct, a visit known as the gōsha-mairi. Many neighborhoods time it for the lunch break, so a traveler arriving at the station around midday can often see several floats at once just outside the exit.

July 21 is the main festival. Through the morning the floats gather at the otabisho, a resting station, at the southern end of the district, where they wait to receive the mikoshi carrying the shrine's deity. A masked figure of Sarutahiko leads the portable shrine. When a signal firework goes up around half past noon, the floats set off northward in numbered order, escorting the deity. This daytime procession is the okuriyama.

The night is the reason most people come. At eight o'clock a second firework signals the modoriyama, the return floats, as each neighborhood begins the journey home. Front lanterns glow red in the dark, the warrior dolls are lit by paper lamps from behind, and the haulers pull hard, sometimes breaking into a run. The music shifts to aiya-bushi, the calls grow rougher, and the floats halt now and then so the haulers themselves can dance the Tsuchizaki bon-odori. It is exhilarating and genuinely physical work; locals say a hauler who finishes the night without a single bruise has not really taken part.

The Sound of Tsuchizaki

The festival music is called minato-bayashi, and it ranks among the three great festival music traditions of Akita Prefecture alongside the hanawa-bayashi and the oyama-bayashi of Kakunodate. It is a suite of five pieces, each tied to a moment in the procession. The fast, swinging yose-daiko, said to "gather people," accompanies the morning hours and the welcoming of the mikoshi. A piece called minato-bayashi carries the daytime escort, and aiya-bushi belongs to the night.

Inside the musicians' tower a single player handles each instrument, rotating between drum, flute and hand gong without ever letting the music stop. Most players can perform all three. The tradition passed through hereditary households before the war and is now sustained by several preservation societies based in the port.

Around Tsuchizaki and Akita

Closest to the festival ground is Port Tower Selion, a tall observation tower beside a roadside station on Akita's waterfront, an easy walk from Honchō-dōri across National Route 7. Central Akita is about fifteen minutes away by train. There a visitor can walk the grounds of Senshū Park, laid out on the ruins of Kubota Castle, and see the Akita Museum of Art, known for a vast mural by the painter Léonard Foujita.

Travelers timing a longer trip should note that Akita's other great summer event, the Kantō Festival, follows in early August. Its performers balance long bamboo poles hung with paper lanterns, and its drumming shares a close family resemblance with the yose-daiko heard in Tsuchizaki. Seeing both gives a fuller sense of how this corner of northern Japan marks its short, intense summer.