Chichibu Night Festival

Popular tradition explains the festival as a yearly tryst. The female deity of Chichibu Shrine, identified with Myōken, the deified Pole Star, meets on this one night the male dragon god of Mount Bukō, the limestone mountain that dominates the Chichibu basin. The festival site (otabisho) where the floats gather is the place of their meeting.

The story overlays an older agricultural logic: the mountain was a source of water for the fields, and the festival gives thanks for the harvest and for the silk year.

Chichibu has two kinds of float. The two kasaboko carry tall decorations of artificial flowers in their original form, though for the procession these are now usually removed because of overhead cables; the four yatai are roofed floats whose sides can be extended to form a stage. All six are elaborately carved and lacquered and hung with embroidered curtains, and each weighs well over ten tonnes.

The floats have been registered as Important Tangible Folk Cultural Properties since 1962. Outside the festival, the Chichibu Matsuri Kaikan museum beside the shrine displays float components and explains the festival.

On 2 December, the eve (yoimiya), floats are displayed and hauled through the town, and on some of the yatai kabuki is performed on the extended stage, a practice known as yatai shibai. Chichibu Kagura, a sacred dance also designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property, is performed at the shrine.

The main festival on 3 December ends in the night procession. The mikoshi of the shrine leads, and the six floats follow, hauled by hundreds of people in turn up the steep Dangozaka slope to the otabisho. Fireworks are launched over the town through the evening, and the floats' arrival at the top of the slope, lit by their lanterns, is the climax of the festival.

In the Edo period, the festival coincided with the silk market of Chichibu, and the town's prosperity from silk financed the floats and their decoration; the festival was sometimes called the 'silk festival'. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Chichibu meisen, a striped and patterned silk fabric, became widely popular across Japan.

The festival remains a community undertaking of the six float-owning neighbourhoods, which keep and maintain the floats and train the musicians and haulers.

Chichibu is reached from Ikebukuro in Tokyo by Seibu Railway limited express in about eighty minutes, or via the Chichibu Railway. Crowds on the night of 3 December are very large, and the viewing areas near the Dangozaka slope and the otabisho are strictly managed. Winter nights in the basin are cold, and much of the festival takes place outdoors after dark.