Tanabata (Star Festival)

Orihime, the weaver princess and daughter of the Heavenly Emperor, wove beautiful cloth on the bank of the Heavenly River. Her father married her to Hikoboshi, a cowherd from the other bank, but the two were so absorbed in each other that she stopped weaving and he let his cattle stray. In anger the Heavenly Emperor separated them on opposite sides of the river and allowed them to meet only on the seventh night of the seventh month. In one version a flock of magpies spreads its wings to form a bridge; if it rains, the river floods and the lovers must wait another year.

In the sky, Orihime is Vega in the constellation Lyra and Hikoboshi is Altair in Aquila, on either side of the Milky Way. With Deneb they form the Summer Triangle, high overhead on summer evenings.

The legend and the festival came from China, where the seventh night of the seventh month, Qixi, was linked with the qiqiaojie, a festival at which women prayed for skill in weaving and needlework. At the Nara and Heian courts this became kikkoden, a ceremony with offerings, poetry and music; the Man'yoshu anthology contains many poems about the meeting of the stars.

It merged with a native Japanese belief in the tanabatatsume, a maiden who wove cloth for a visiting deity at the water's edge, using a loom called tanabata. This is why the characters for 'seventh evening' are read 'tanabata'. In the Edo period the shogunate fixed Tanabata among the five official festivals, and the custom of hanging written wishes on bamboo spread among townspeople and in terakoya schools, where children wrote their wishes for improvement in calligraphy.

The central custom is writing a wish on a tanzaku, a narrow strip of paper, and tying it to a bamboo branch. Tanzaku traditionally come in five colours, reflecting the five elements of Chinese thought. Around them hang paper decorations with their own meanings: long streamers for weaving threads, paper kimono for skill in sewing, nets for a good catch, purses for prosperity and paper cranes for long life. Bamboo is used because it grows straight and fast, and its rustling was thought to summon the gods.

After the festival the bamboo was traditionally set afloat on a river or the sea to carry away impurity, a custom called tanabata nagashi, which links Tanabata with the purification rites that precede Obon. Today the decorations are usually burnt at a shrine or disposed of with ordinary waste.

Many towns turn Tanabata into a street festival with large decorations hung over shopping arcades. The most famous is Sendai Tanabata Matsuri, held from 6 to 8 August, a date that follows the old calendar season; its thousands of elaborate paper streamers make it one of the three great summer festivals of Tohoku. Hiratsuka in Kanagawa and Anjo in Aichi hold large July festivals. In parts of Tohoku, Tanabata overlaps with the Nebuta and Neputa lantern festivals, which scholars link to the same midsummer purification rites.