Uesugi Snow Lantern Festival

The Uesugi Snow Lantern Festival is a winter festival held over a weekend each February in Yonezawa, Yamagata. It fills the grounds of Uesugi Shrine and the surrounding Matsugasaki Park with snow lanterns lit by candles.

Highlights

About 200 snow lanterns and 1,000 snow bonbori (雪ぼんぼり), small lamps hollowed out of snow, hold candles across the grounds and are lit after dark. Local groups and students build the lanterns in the days before the festival: in 2026, 98 groups made 187 of them. Lanterns along the shrine approach are lit for a preview on the Friday evening.

A tent village sells local products, and a stage beside the Denkoku no Mori museum hosts songs and dances by local groups. A chinkonsai (鎮魂祭), a memorial ceremony for the war dead, is also part of the festival.

History

Uesugi Shrine, in the grounds of the former Yonezawa Castle, enshrines the warlord Uesugi Kenshin (1530-1578). The festival has been held there since the late 1970s and is organized by the Yonezawa Shiki no Matsuri Committee, the city's seasonal festivals committee.

The 2027 edition

The 2027 festival is the 50th. The organizers are planning commemorative projects for the anniversary and are raising part of the money through crowdfunding.