Yatsushiro Myoken Matsuri

The Myoken festival is the autumn festival of Yatsushiro Shrine, known as Myokengu, in Yatsushiro in Kumamoto Prefecture. It has been held for about 390 years, since the Edo period. Its procession is an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property of the state, and it is one of the thirty-three float festivals of Japan entered together on the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

In September 2026 the shrine and the society that keeps the festival announced that this year's procession and everything around it would not be held, because of damage from the Kumamoto earthquake of 2026 and concerns for safety. The eve festival, the children's festival and the events planned for the tenth year of the UNESCO listing are all cancelled with it. Some of the rites will still be performed at the shrine.

In an ordinary year the procession forms about forty separate turns and stretches a kilometre and a half along the road, covering some six kilometres over the two days: out on the first day, back on the second. It ends at Tosaki, a broad stretch of riverbank, where each group performs in turn and horses are ridden hard along the gravel.

Kida

The figure people come for is the Kida, a beast with the body of a turtle and the head of a serpent, which the god of the shrine is said to have ridden across the sea from China some 1,300 years ago. It is three metres long, two and a half high, and weighs more than a hundred kilograms. Five men carry it at a time, swinging its head as they run.

Kasaboko

Nine kasaboko are drawn in the procession, tall canopied floats, each decorated differently with things that stand for long life and good fortune. They took their present form early in the eighteenth century, and each is put together fresh every year from two or three hundred pieces of wood without a single nail.

Lions and the horses

A pair of lions, male and female, dance to charumera, gongs and drums, a form learned long ago from the Kunchi festival at Nagasaki. Parents bring children for the lion to take their heads in its mouth, which is held to make them grow up strong.

Horses go in the procession too: the god's own horse, horses in ornament, and wooden horses that were once given to the shrine when a child of the castle town reached the ages that are marked.