Tochigi Float Festival

Tochigi Aki Matsuri is the largest festival in Tochigi, and it is held only every second year. Over two days in November, tall floats carrying figures are drawn through the streets of the old merchant quarter, where the storehouses the town is known for still stand.

The town made its money on the river trade with Edo and as a post station on the road that carried imperial envoys to Nikko, and the festival is the merchants' festival: the floats belong to the districts, not to a shrine.

They are Edo-style doll floats, and the ones drawn now were built in the Edo and Meiji periods. Each has a large figure standing on top, high enough that the tallest reaches nearly eight metres, and each belongs to one district of the town.

The figures are a strange and telling mixture. Some come from Japanese myth and history: Susanoo, Amaterasu, the emperor Jinmu, Yamato Takeru, Benkei, Shizuka Gozen, Momotaro. Others come from the Chinese Romance of the Three Kingdoms — Guan Yu, Liu Bei, Zhang Fei — which the merchants of the 1890s evidently thought as much their own. The oldest of them dates from 1848.

Below the figures the floats carry embroidered curtains, carved panels and lacquer, and the districts have kept them in repair for more than a century.

The festival is traced to 1874, when a rite for the emperor Jinmu was held in the grounds of the prefectural office. In 1893, at the celebration for the opening of the first chamber of commerce in the prefecture, six districts brought floats. In 1906 one more district joined with its own, and the festival took the shape it still has. From 1937, when Tochigi became a city, the floats have been drawn as the city's own festival.

On one or both days the town's schoolchildren, in their third and fourth years, pull a float of their own through the streets.