Sendai Tanabata

The festival runs from 6 to 8 August, a fixed date regardless of weekday. This follows the tsuki-okure (one-month-late) convention adopted in many regions after Japan switched to the Gregorian calendar in 1873: rather than using 7 July, which falls in the rainy season and well before the traditional date, communities moved the festival to 7 August, framed here by the days either side.

On the evening of 5 August, the Sendai Tanabata fireworks are launched near the Hirose river and serve as the festival's eve.

The signature decoration is the fukinagashi, a cascade of paper streamers several metres long hanging from a decorated ball at the top of a bamboo pole around ten metres high. Each one is made by hand, largely from washi (Japanese paper), and many take weeks of work. The decorations are traditionally put up on the morning of 6 August and taken down after the last evening.

Alongside the streamers, Sendai keeps the custom of seven smaller decorations (nanatsu kazari), each carrying a specific wish. Visitors can write their own wishes on tanzaku paper strips at stands in the arcades.

Tanabata was observed in Sendai from the early Edo period, and local tradition credits the first lord of the Sendai domain, Date Masamune, with encouraging it as an occasion for women's crafts and poetry. The festival lost ground after the calendar reform of 1873 and the economic difficulties of the early twentieth century.

In 1927 the merchants of the city centre revived it on a grand scale as a way of drawing customers, and the modern commercial festival with its competing shop decorations dates from then. After wartime suspension, the decorations returned in 1946 to a city centre largely destroyed by bombing, a moment remembered as a symbol of Sendai's recovery.

Sendai Tanabata falls in the same week as the other large summer festivals of northern Honshu, including the Aomori Nebuta Matsuri, the Akita Kantō Matsuri and the Yamagata Hanagasa Matsuri. Because the dates are close together, many visitors combine several of them in one journey, and they are often grouped as the great festivals of Tohoku.

After the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 the festival was held as scheduled that summer, with decorations carrying messages of mourning and reconstruction.

The main decorations are within walking distance of Sendai Station, which lies about ninety minutes from Tokyo by Tōhoku Shinkansen. Crowds are heaviest in the evenings and at weekends. The arcades are covered, so the decorations remain on view in light rain, though heavy rain can lead to some being protected or taken in.