Towada City Autumn Festival

The Towada City Autumn Festival is held over three days at the beginning of September in Towada, and is the largest in the city's year. Floats and drum carts are drawn through the middle of the town, with a portable shrine (mikoshi) and a dancing procession, and the streets are closed to traffic while they pass.

The festival goes back to the opening up of the Sanbongihara plain in the last years of the Edo period. The land there was dry and hard to farm, and the settlers who broke it in held a festival to ask for a good harvest. That prayer is what the present festival descends from, and the ground it is held on is the town that grew out of the reclamation.

The floats are the work of neighbourhood associations and are drawn by hand. The drum carts go with them, and where two crews meet they play against each other, which is called kenka daiko, the fighting drums.

Two older performances belong to the festival. The Nanbu Koma Odori is a dance in which the dancers wear the figure of a horse, from a district long known for breeding them. The Towada bayashi, the festival music of flutes, drums and hand gongs, is played in competition between the crews on the middle day, when the floats stand still in the street to be looked at and judged.

Anyone may take part rather than watch. The organisers ask each year for people to join the drums and flutes, to pull the floats, or to help build them.