Seihakusai Festival

Seihakusai is the spring festival of Otokonushi Shrine, also called Sanno Shrine, in Nanao, Ishikawa. Its three huge floats, the dekayama (でか山), are hauled through the centre of Nanao, and it is the largest festival on the Noto Peninsula.

History

The festival is said to have been established in 981 by Minamoto no Shitago, then governor of Noto, as a festival of the province. The floats are said to date from 1473, when Hatakeyama Yoshimune, the third Hatakeyama lord of Noto and a keen importer of Kyoto culture, offered floats to the festival on the model of those of the Gion Festival in Kyoto. For a time in the Edo period the floats stood as high as 18 metres.

The float event was designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property of Japan in 1983. In 2016 it was inscribed on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list as one of the 33 Yama, Hoko, Yatai float festivals of Japan.

The dekayama

Each dekayama stands about 12 metres high, weighs about 20 tonnes and runs on wheels 2 metres across. Its stage carries life-size dolls in a scene from kabuki or history, and a young pine is set somewhere in the scene to call down the gods. The three floats belong to the districts of Kajimachi, Fuchumachi and Uomachi.

The floats move to the chant of kiyari (木遣り), work songs. At narrow corners the young men crowd onto an 8-metre lever to lift the front wheels and swing the float round on a smaller wheel, a manoeuvre called tsujimawashi (辻廻し).

What happens

On the evening before the festival, the dolls for the floats are displayed in the homes of the float districts that had a celebration that year, a custom called ningyo-mi (人形見). The floats set out on the first night, gather at Otokonushi Shrine on the second day and line up near the Noto Shokusai Market and Sentai Bridge on the third.