Kuwana, Mie

The sound arrives before anything else.

On the first Sunday of August in Kuwana, in Mie, as many as forty festival cars gather before Kasuga Shrine—three-wheeled, hung with tiered paper lanterns, each fitted at the back with gongs and a great drum. And then, all at once, they are struck.

People call it the noisiest festival in Japan, and one of its strangest. On the eve, at midnight exactly, the shrine's chief priest strikes a single drum, and forty cars answer together. For a moment the whole town is nothing but sound.

The origin is a stone. For the shrine's old hiyori rite, townspeople would haul carts down to the Machiya River to fetch stones for the festival ground, playing flutes and singing on the way. Fetching stones—ishi-tori—gave the festival its name.

On the main day the cars process along the old Tokaido road toward the shrine, rough and proud. Some carry carvings by Tatekawa Washiro and ornaments attributed to Takamura Koun. The whole town takes part; it is the year's great entertainment.

It is a national Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property, and part of the UNESCO-listed Yama, Hoko, Yatai float festivals.

Come thinking of it as a festival you listen to. If you make it to the midnight start, you touch the very core of Kuwana's summer. August nights here are hot—bring water.

Nabana no Sato is a flower park on the edge of Kuwana, between Nagoya and the sea, and for more than half the year—mid-autumn to the doorstep of summer—its nights belong to one of the largest illumination displays in Japan. Millions of LEDs turn the gardens into light: a 200-meter tunnel of glowing petal-shaped bulbs that visitors walk through slowly, and a vast main field where the theme changes annually—Mount Fuji one year, the aurora another, the sea—rendered as a moving painting the size of a hillside.

The scale is what photographs, but the setting is what surprises. This is a working flower park, and by day the begonia greenhouse, the plum and weeping-cherry groves, and the seasonal tulip fields are reason enough to come. Many visitors arrive for the night show and find themselves glad they came early.

The island of attractions around it makes logistics easy: Nagashima Onsen's baths and hotels are next door, along with a large outlet mall, and direct buses run from Nagoya Station in about fifty minutes. Illumination begins at sunset—earlier in midwinter, when the air is clearest and the light sharpest. Weekday evenings are far calmer than weekends.

One honest note: this is a commercial illumination, polished and popular, not a folk festival. Come for spectacle, stay for the flowers, and you will have used the place exactly as intended.