Tanabata

Tanabata, the "Star Festival", is kept on the seventh day of the seventh month (7 July in most of Japan, or August by the older calendar in some regions), and it celebrates a romance written in the sky. It derives from a Chinese legend, that of the weaver girl Orihime (the star Vega) and the cowherd Hikoboshi (Altair), lovers set on opposite banks of the Milky Way and permitted to meet only once a year, on this night, when a bridge is formed for them, provided the sky is clear. The tale reached Japan and merged with an indigenous weaving-and-purification custom, taking its written name Tanabata from an old word for a ceremonial weaving maiden.

The festival's best-known custom is the writing of wishes on strips of coloured paper, tanzaku, which are tied to freshly cut bamboo branches, often together with paper streamers and ornaments; after the festival the bamboo is traditionally floated on a river or burned, sending the wishes off. Originally associated with prayers for skill in weaving, sewing and the crafts, and for good handwriting and learning, the wishes are now for anything the writer hopes for. Towns hold large Tanabata festivals with elaborate streamers and decorations, and the sight of bamboo hung with paper wishes is one of the emblems of the Japanese summer.

The city of Sendai holds by far the largest and most famous Tanabata festival in Japan, observed in August by the older calendar reckoning rather than in July, and transforms its central shopping streets for several days each summer with enormous, elaborately crafted paper streamer decorations, some extending many metres down from overhead arcades, created by local shopping districts competing informally for the most impressive display, a scale of civic and commercial investment in the festival that draws large numbers of domestic and international tourists specifically to see the decorations rather than for any particular religious or devotional purpose.

The Sendai festival's origins as a promoted civic event trace to local merchant associations reviving and dramatically expanding the older domestic wish-making custom in the early twentieth century specifically to draw visitors and business to the city's shopping districts during a summer lull, a deliberate commercial and civic development that succeeded well enough that Sendai's version of Tanabata is now, for many Japanese people and most foreign visitors, the default image of the festival, even though the vast majority of the domestic bamboo-and-wish-strip custom described in this entry's first article is practised far more modestly in ordinary homes, schools and neighbourhoods across the rest of the country without anything like the same civic spectacle.