Benkei Matsuri

Benkei Matsuri is held over two days at the start of October in Tanabe, on the coast of Wakayama Prefecture. It has been held every year since 1987.

The whole of it is built around one man. Musashibo Benkei was the warrior monk who served Minamoto no Yoshitsune, and most of what is told of him comes from medieval tales rather than record. Several places claim him. Tanabe's claim is the strongest of them, resting on the account that he was born the son of the head of the Kumano priesthood, and on the sites the town keeps: the cauldron and the well said to have held his first bath, and the stone he is said to have sat on as a child.

The shrine the festival opens at has its own part in the story. During the war between the Taira and the Minamoto, both sides asked the Kumano fleet for help. The priest who commanded it, held by tradition to be Benkei's father, set seven cockerels against seven before the shrine to learn the will of the god. The birds standing for the Minamoto won, and two hundred ships sailed for them. The shrine is named for that fight.

The first evening belongs to a play about Benkei, staged in the shrine grounds by people of the town, who rehearse there three nights a week through the autumn. A brass band plays before it starts.

The second day is given to dancing. The geta dance has been part of the festival since the first one: about six hundred dancers take the main street in wooden clogs, which are what the dance is named for and what it is danced in. Yosakoi teams perform from the morning on the seafront. The two days close with everyone dancing together.

A tent market of local food and goods runs on the seafront through the Saturday, and rice cakes are thrown to the crowd. Other bodies put on their own events at the same time: the town's own fireworks, older than the festival and in their fifty-sixth year, which send up about 3,500 shells over the water; a chance to sail on a coastguard patrol boat; and a gathering of cosplayers.