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Nihonmatsu Chochin Matsuri: The Lantern Festival of Fukushima
Fire is passed from a shrine's flame to the lanterns, and the festival begins. On an Octo…
Fire is passed from a shrine's flame to the lanterns, and the festival begins.
On an October night in Nihonmatsu, in the hills of Fukushima, seven wheeled floats move out from seven neighborhoods, each carrying more than three hundred crimson lanterns. The flame of Nihonmatsu Shrine is carried out and touched to them one by one, and slowly the dark fills with light.
The festival is about three hundred and seventy years old. A domain lord, Niwa Mitsushige, enshrined the local deity and let any commoner come to pray, and the people's gratitude, over generations, became this. It was once held under the old lunar calendar, in the eighth month; after a great fire in the Taisho era it moved to October.
The tallest lanterns—suginari, stacked into a triangle—rise more than ten meters. The floats are lacquered and gilded, and when the young men's calls and the drums and flutes begin, three thousand flames drift through the streets, reddening the night sky as they go.
There are three days. The first night is the yoimatsuri, the only time all seven floats gather together, lit at the shrine and pulled down to the station. The second day carries the portable shrine through town; the third is the quiet after.
Most of the year Nihonmatsu is known for its chrysanthemum dolls and the ruins of Kasumigajo castle. Come for the festival and you get the other town: the daytime for the castle hill, the night for following lanterns, and, a little further out, the hot springs of Dake.
Go on the first night. October in Fukushima is cold; bring a layer, and wait for a float to climb the slope toward you. As the light comes closer, the sound of it reaches your body before the meaning does.
Lanterns sway from the floats of Nihonmatsu Shrine each autumn, their paper skins glowing amber against the castle-town grid that has barely shifted since the Edo period. Nihonmatsu sits in a basin between the Abukuma River to the east and Adatara-san rising to the west, a geography that has always kept the town turned slightly inward, attentive to its own rhythms. The castle ruins still stand above the streets, and at Dairinji temple the graves of the Nihonmatsu Shōnentai — the young fighters lost in the Boshin War — sit quietly under old cedars.
The town's crafts and ferments accumulate without announcement. Sake breweries cluster along the older streets, and the tradition of Nihonmatsu furniture — a regional woodworking lineage — continues in workshops nearby. At the Adatara foothills, Gakuonsen is the kind of hot-spring settlement that operates on its own slow schedule, indifferent to trend. In October, chrysanthemum figures assembled for the Nihonmatsu Kikuongyō fill the castle grounds with the faint green smell of stems and damp soil — a festival that turns the whole town into a temporary horticultural argument.
Adatara-san gives the place its horizon and its water. The mountain feeds the sake rice, the apple orchards of Hayama, and the thermal springs below. At Kakurinji temple, hydrangea blooms in dense clusters across the hillside — not a spectacle arranged for visitors, but a planting that simply recurs each year. Nihonmatsu carries its layers — castle town, sake town, chrysanthemum town, mountain town — without insisting you notice any particular one.
Stay in Nihommatsu, Fukushima
What converges here
- Nihonmatsu Castle Ruins
- Former Nihonmatsu Domain Kaisekimeihi
- Scenic Places along Oku no Hosomichi
- Great Cedar of Kiwata
- Sugisawa no Osugi (Great Cedar of Sugisawa)
- Bandai-Asahi
- Mount Adatara
- Mount Hiyama
- Nihonmatsu
- Adachi
- Sugita