Kanda Matsuri

By shrine tradition Kanda Myōjin was founded in 730 near the present-day Ōtemachi. It was moved to its current site in 1616, when the shogunate was reshaping Edo around its castle, and it was regarded as a guardian of the city. It enshrines three deities: Ōnamuchi (identified with Daikoku, bringer of good fortune and harmonious marriage), Sukunahikona (identified with Ebisu, patron of commerce) and Taira no Masakado, a tenth-century warrior who rebelled against the court and whose spirit was worshipped locally as a protector.

In 1874 Masakado was removed as a principal deity because the Meiji government considered him a rebel against the emperor; he was restored as the third deity in 1984. Today the shrine is also popular with the technology and anime scene of neighbouring Akihabara.

Tokugawa Ieyasu is said to have prayed for victory at Kanda Myōjin before the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, and he won on the day of the shrine's festival. Under the Tokugawa shogunate the procession was granted the privilege of entering the grounds of Edo Castle so that the shogun could view it, which earned it, together with the Sannō Matsuri, the name tenka matsuri, 'festival of the realm'. In 1681 the shogunate fixed the alternation, holding the two festivals in alternate years.

Edo-period processions featured dozens of tall dashi floats with elaborate figures. Most were lost in the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 and the air raids of the Second World War, and the tall floats could no longer pass under overhead wires; today the procession includes a smaller number of restored or newly built floats, and the mikoshi have taken centre stage.

The festival opens with rites at the shrine. On the Saturday, the shinkōsai procession sets out at dawn and makes a day-long circuit of the shrine's parish: the deities travel in three hōren (phoenix-crowned palanquins) and mikoshi, accompanied by priests, costumed attendants, mounted archers, floats and musicians, some five hundred people in all. The procession passes through Kanda, Nihonbashi, Ōtemachi and Marunouchi and returns in the evening through Akihabara.

On the Sunday, the neighbourhood associations bring their own mikoshi to the shrine in the mikoshi-miyairi. Around two hundred mikoshi, large and small, are carried up to the shrine one after another from morning to evening, amid chanting, whistles and the rhythmic lifting and shaking by which bearers enliven the deity inside.

Kanda Myōjin is a short walk from Ochanomizu, Suehirochō and Akihabara stations. The shrine precinct is crowded on the Sunday of the mikoshi entries; the Saturday procession can be followed at many points along its route, which the shrine publishes before the festival. Watching is free; bearers are members of neighbourhood associations and their guests, and outsiders should not join a mikoshi without being invited.