
Kyoto Hanezu Dance and Plum Festival
An enchanting festival with a dark backstory. Witness beautiful plum blossoms and a solemn dance at the Hanezu Odori Dance Festival in Kyoto.
An enchanting festival with a dark backstory. Witness beautiful plum blossoms and a solemn dance at the Hanezu Odori Dance Festival in Kyoto.
Join this annual celebration of Tagata Shrine in Aichi and promote all things phallic.
The Seiryu-e Festival at Kiyomizu-dera Temple in Kyoto celebrates the Blue Dragon, a guardian deity thought to protect the city’s east.
On the second Sunday of March, a 2.2 meter tall phallic-shaped statue that weighs approximately 600kg is paraded around a small village in Niigata.
Stunning plum blossom, tea ceremonies, and even Geisha make an unmissable event.
Getting soaked with freezing water while half-naked in the middle of winter? Catch Iwate’s Daito Ohara Water Festival.
Visit the Suita Fire Festival at Jōkō Enmanji Temple in Osaka for fire rituals, sacred smoke, and blessings for the year ahead.
Warm up this February at Ōhara’s Sanzen-in Temple, where locals serve steaming soup made from locally grown radish.
9,000 men, freezing water, and one God-man. Japan’s wildest naked festival is not for the faint-hearted.
Watch the magical sight of of dozens of paper balloons adorning the night sky.
Festival food and daruma dolls aplenty. For a daruma market of historic proportions, there's none quite like Mihara City's annual Daruma Festival.
A steamy festival in the depths of the freezing winter
Setsubun at Yasaka Shrine's is unusual because it features geiko, geisha from Kyoto.
Fancy a dance with a demon? Nara's Kinpusenji Temple offers a unique Setsubun experience with its annual Demon Festival.
An amazing chance to see a remote, snow-covered thatched village illuminated with hundreds of lanterns.
See an entire mountainside in Nara go up in flames as fireworks are launched behind it.
A traditional Japanese New Years' festival to bring you some luck.
Teams race to be the first to reach the shrine and onlookers also push to touch the special charms of this shrine.
Watch men get tossed into snow and behold the messy ash-smearing chaos.
See dozens of loincloth-clad men and boys doused in very cold water as they compete in teams for banknotes.
Put some heat into your winter and New Year with this steamy (in more ways than one!) festival.
Join in this noisy and raucous festival as people knock on wooden boards to get the attention of a lucky God.