Sawara Grand Festival

Twice a year, the old merchant town of Sawara gives itself over to its floats. The Sawara Grand Festival is held once in July and again in October, and between them they count as one of the three great float festivals of the Kanto region. The tradition runs back some three hundred years, and in 2016 it was inscribed on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list.

Sawara made its money on the river trade to Edo, and it grew wealthy enough to earn the boast Edo-masari – "better than Edo". Much of the town it built survives: a preservation district of dark wooden merchant houses lining the Ono River. The floats pass so close that they graze the eaves.

The river splits Sawara in two, and each half has its own festival and its own shrine. The summer festival, in July, is the Gion festival of Yasaka Shrine, and ten floats are pulled through the Honjuku district on the east bank. The autumn festival, in October, belongs to Suwa Shrine, and fourteen floats work the Shinjuku district to the west. Both run Friday to Sunday.

Built entirely of zelkova wood and carved in the heavy Kanto style with lions, dragons and scenes from legend, the floats stand around seven metres tall and weigh three to four tonnes. Each is crowned by an enormous figure – a historical or legendary character, some reaching four metres, made by master doll-makers of the Edo and Meiji periods. The oldest surviving float in the town dates to 1822.

Beneath the figure sits the musicians' deck, where the geza ensemble plays as the float moves – some fifteen players of flute, drums and gong, close to an orchestra of Japanese instruments. Ahead of the float, dancers perform a form descended from tekomai, the dancers who once led processions.

The manoeuvre everyone comes to see is the nonoji-mawashi – the "figure-of-の turn". Several tonnes of float are spun through a series of rotations tracing the shape of the kana character の, and the mark of a well-executed turn is that the giant doll on top revolves slowly, as though performing a Noh dance.

The music is reckoned one of the three great festival musics of Japan. It plays continuously as the floats move, and after dark, when each float lights its lanterns, the town takes on an entirely different character.

For anyone visiting outside the festival dates, the Suigo Sawara Float Museum displays two of the floats year-round, one from each season.