Heian Court Boat Music Festival "Miyajima Kangensai" & "Yamaguchi Tanabata Chochin Lantern Festival"

The **Miyajima Kangensai** (*Imperial Court Music Festival on the Sea*) is the grandest, most sacred, and most poetic annual ritual of Itsukushima Shrine on Miyajima Island, held on the 17th day of the sixth lunar month (typically falling in July or August) during the summer spring tides. Established over eight hundred years ago in the late Heian period by the legendary warlord **Taira no Kiyomori**, the festival adapts the Kyoto aristocratic pastime of playing imperial court orchestral music (*Gagaku*) aboard pond boats onto the vast stage of the Seto Inland Sea to console and entertain the resident deities of Itsukushima. Three traditional wooden barges are lashed together side-by-side to form a single majestic ceremonial vessel (*Gozabune*) draped in silk curtains and glowing paper lanterns, carrying the sacred *Mikoshi* palanquin alongside Shinto priests and musicians playing *Ryuteki* flutes, *Hichiriki* double-reed pipes, *Biwa* lutes, and *Koto* zithers. As twilight settles over the Ono-seto Strait and the great vermilion O-Torii gate shimmers upon the rising tide, the ceremonial *Gozabune* is towed across the sea by traditional oared boats to visit coastal shrines before returning to the flooded wooden corridors of Itsukushima Shrine around midnight. Inside the narrow, torch-lit sacred bay of the shrine, the massive vessel executes a breathtaking triple-spin maneuver twice while the ethereal melodies of ancient Heian *Gagaku* music echo across the dark water—an unforgettable synthesis of maritime skill, architecture, and spirituality. Just west of Hiroshima in Yamaguchi City on August 6 and 7 each year, the summer night sky transforms into a glowing crimson canopy during the **Yamaguchi Tanabata Chochin Festival**, celebrated as one of Japan's Three Great Fire Festivals (*Nihon Sandai Himatsuri*). Originating over 500 years ago during the Muromachi period when the ruling **Ouchi Clan** hoisted candle-lit lanterns atop tall bamboo poles on the night of Tanabata to pray for ancestral spirits, the festival illuminates downtown shopping arcades and Park Road with tens of thousands of round red paper lanterns (*Chochin*)—each lit inside by a real flickering wax candle rather than electric bulbs—creating mesmerizing tunnels and towering trees of warm scarlet flame.