Kumakabe 20th Day Festival Frame Flag Event

A Festival Built Around a Twenty-Meter Banner

Every September 20th, the small town of Nakajima on the Noto Peninsula fills with the sound of gongs and drums and a long, rising shout of "Iyasakasā." Crimson banners taller than a six-storey building sway above the rooftops, carried on the shoulders of young men who jog them through narrow streets toward a single shrine. This is the Kumakabuto Hatsuka Festival, the autumn rite of Kumakabuto Arakashihiko Shrine in Nanao City, Ishikawa Prefecture.

The festival is better known locally as Okumakabuto Matsuri. Its formal designation, registered as an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property in January 1981, is "the frame-banner ritual of the Kumakabuto Twentieth-Day Festival." The name points to the object at the heart of everything: the wakubata, a towering frame banner of deep crimson woollen cloth that reaches roughly twenty meters into the sky.

Carrying something that tall through a working town is difficult, and that difficulty is the point. The men who shoulder a banner steady it with four to six guy ropes while keeping it moving, and the whole apparatus seems perpetually on the edge of toppling. Watching it stay upright is part of what draws crowds back year after year.

Continental Roots and a Shrine of Nineteen Branches

Kumakabuto Arakashihiko Shrine sits in the Miyamae district of Nakajima. Records naming the shrine survive from the Heian period, and the festival is generally understood to reach back several centuries, with the banner tradition often placed in the early Edo era.

The shrine's name carries an unusual history. According to the Nihon Shoki, the enshrined deity Kumakabuto Arakashihiko is associated with royalty from the Ara polity of the southern Korean peninsula, while a companion deity is linked to a prince from the same region who is said to have crossed to Tsuruga in present-day Fukui. Several scholars hear an echo of that continental connection in the festival's distinctive gong-and-drum rhythms. Whether or not the link can be proven, it gives the rite a reputation as evidence of how layered Noto's cultural inheritance has become.

What makes the festival structurally unusual is that it is a yoriai matsuri, a gathering festival. Kumakabuto Arakashihiko Shrine serves as the head shrine for nineteen branch shrines scattered across four former villages: Kumaki, Nakajima, Nishigishi, and Toyokawa. On festival day, each branch shrine sends its own portable shrine, banner, drums, and gongs. The single event is therefore really nineteen processions converging on one point.

A quieter custom once ran alongside the public spectacle. In Noto, a woman who had married into a parish during the past year would visit her new community's shrine in formal dress, her hair arranged in the traditional shimada coiffure and her mother at her side. Okumakabuto Matsuri was one of the days this introduction took place, folding a private rite of social acceptance into the noise of the festival.

Why the Ritual Was Designated

When the Agency for Cultural Affairs registered the ritual in 1981, the citation singled out one feature above all: the sheer scale of the banners. Carrying a frame banner of more than ten ken, well over eighteen meters in the older unit of measure, is described in the official record as exceptionally rare.

The designation also valued the festival as a clear, well-preserved example of a regionally distinctive autumn rite. The criterion it was registered under recognizes practices that show a typical and fundamental aspect of Japanese folk life. A gathering festival in which whole villages turn out, families included, to celebrate the harvest and the year's catch fits that description closely. The official commentary notes that the streets along the route fill with onlookers and that households participate as units, not merely as spectators.

What to Watch For

The day unfolds in stages, and each has its own character.

From around seven in the morning, the branch shrines set out from their home villages. One coastal hamlet, Sezarashi, loads its portable shrine onto a boat and crosses Nanao West Bay, timing the arrival at the mouth of the Kumaki River to the sunrise. By eight o'clock, the processions begin entering the shrine precinct. The portable shrines and banners are run toward the worship hall in a burst of speed, the banner crews threading a twenty-meter pole through a crowded gate. This phase alone lasts a couple of hours.

Watch the figure leading each procession. He is the sarutahiko, locally also called men, wearing a tall torikabuto headdress and a long-nosed tengu mask and holding a wand called a menbō. On reaching the worship hall he raps the steps with the wand to announce his group's arrival, then dances. During the late-morning offering ceremony, the sarutahiko of every shrine perform together while paired ranks of gongs and drums, dozens of sets in all, strike in unison. The combination of the loose, comic dance and the disciplined percussion is one of the festival's signatures.

The climax comes in the afternoon at the otabisho, the resting ground for the deities, on a meadow called Kamowara about 700 meters from the shrine. Here the banner crews perform shimada-kuzushi: they tilt a banner until its top sweeps within inches of the ground, then bring it upright again. The name evokes the unraveling of the shimada topknot, and the maneuver demands that an entire crew move as one. With dozens of crimson banners against the green hills and rows of gilded portable shrines, the meadow becomes the image most photographs of the festival are taken to capture.

Planning Your Visit

The festival is held on September 20th regardless of the day of the week. The main action runs from roughly eight in the morning until about five in the evening, so a visitor willing to arrive early can follow the whole arc from the chaotic entry runs to the final tilting of the banners.

Kumakabuto Arakashihiko Shrine is in the Nakajima area of Nanao City. The nearest railway station is Noto-Nakajima on the Noto Railway line, reachable from Nanao Station. On festival day a shuttle bus typically links the station and other points to the shrine and the festival hall; schedules are published each year by the preservation society. By car, the Noto Toll Road's Yokota interchange is the usual exit.

One practical caution: the festival has faced disruption in recent years, including a cancellation caused by a typhoon and the wider effects of the 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake on the region. Anyone planning a trip should confirm the current year's program with the Okumakabuto Festival preservation society or the Nanao City tourism office before traveling. Photography from the public route is generally welcomed, but the banner crews need room to work, so it is worth keeping clear of the guy ropes.

Around Nakajima

Nakajima rewards an unhurried look. Noto-Nakajima Station itself is a small attraction: a preserved postal railway car stands on the platform, one of only two such cars surviving in Japan, and the grounds around it have been laid out as a modest railway park.

For visitors who want context on the festival outside September, the Nakajima Festival Museum in the same district displays banners and equipment and explains the year's preparations. Nanao is also home to three other major autumn and summer festivals: the Seihaku Festival with its enormous wheeled floats, the Mukoda fire festival on Notojima, and the Issaki lantern festival. The city repays a longer stay for anyone interested in folk ritual. The hot-spring resort of Wakura Onsen, on Nanao Bay, makes a comfortable base.