🏮 Hode Matsuri

帆手まつり

Shiogama, Miyagi (Shiogama Shrine) · Every year on 10 March

Mikoshi

177 days to go
Rooms around Shiogama, Miyagi fill up while the festival is on.

Hotefestival is an early-spring Shinto ritual held every year on March 10 at Shiogama Shrine in Shiogama City, Miyagi Prefecture, and is counted as one of Japan's three great wild mikoshi (portable shrines). The people of Shiogama, facing a major fire in 1682 and the decline of their port town due to canal development, began it as a fire-prevention festival, praying to their tutelary deity for protection from fire and for economic recovery. At first, on January 20, they paraded around carrying a bonten (a pole topped with a decorative finial); in 1733 they began carrying the mikoshi, and in 1872 it was named the Hotefestival and its current date and style were established. Sixteen parishioners dressed in white robes and eboshi (ceremonial headwear) carry a black-lacquered mikoshi weighing about one ton. Behind the wild mikoshi, which moves violently at the deity's will, a procession of over 500 children in fine dress and attendants follows. In particular, the otosagari and oagari — in which the mikoshi is carried down and then back up the 202 steep stone steps of the shrine's front approach — create the festival's greatest spectacle.

Getting there

About 15 minutes on foot from Hon-Shiogama Station on the JR Senseki Line. By car, use the Sanriku Expressway's Rifu-Naka IC, Rifu-Shiogama IC, or Sendai-Kitahama IC.