Kishiwada Danjiri Matsuri

The September festival, involving the districts of the old castle town, takes place on the Saturday (yoimiya, the eve) and Sunday (honmiya, the main day) before Respect for the Aged Day, the third Monday of September. Until 2006 it was tied to fixed dates in mid-September; the move to the weekend was made so that students and working people could take part.

A separate October festival is held by districts in the eastern and inland parts of the city, on a weekend in October around the Sports Day holiday. Both are shrine festivals praying for and giving thanks for the harvest.

A Kishiwada danjiri is built of keyaki (Japanese zelkova), stands around four metres high and weighs around four tonnes. Its sides and roof are covered with carvings of scenes from the Taiheiki, the Tale of the Heike and other war chronicles, and the finest floats are regarded as works of art in their own right. Many have been rebuilt in recent decades by specialist carpenters and carvers, and a new float is a matter of pride for a whole district.

The floats are presented to the shrines in the town, above all Kishiki Shrine near Kishiwada Castle, and pass in front of the castle during the festival.

In the yarimawashi, the rope pullers run into a corner while the team at the rear uses levers and braking to pivot the float, so that it swings round in a single movement. A good turn is fast, clean and tight; a poor one ends with the float striking a house or a pole, which occasionally happens.

Every position has its specialists. The most visible is the daiku-gata, the 'carpenter' who dances on the float's roof with fans in both hands and signals to the team. The festival is organised by district youth and adult associations in a strict age hierarchy, and preparations run through much of the year.

Several accounts of the festival's beginnings exist. The most widely cited holds that in 1703 Okabe Nagayasu, lord of the Kishiwada domain, invited the deity of Fushimi Inari into the castle's third enclosure and held a harvest prayer festival at which townspeople pulled floats. Another links the start to a townsman who, in 1745, brought the practice of festival lanterns back from Osaka; Kishiki Shrine itself describes the festival as one begun by the townspeople to drive away epidemics.

What is certain is that danjiri festivals spread across the Senshū district in the Edo period and that Kishiwada's has been held for about three centuries.

The festival is physically dangerous: participants have been seriously injured and killed over the years, and spectators are kept behind barriers at the corners. Visitors are expected to follow the instructions of marshals and not to stand on the inside of a turn.

Kishiwada is reached from Namba in Osaka by Nankai Electric Railway in about half an hour. The area around the castle and the main corners is the most crowded, and the Danjiri Kaikan museum near the castle explains the floats and shows the festival in film outside the season.