Festivals in Japan

Kyoto’s Gion Matsuri, one of Japan’s three great festivals, runs for the entire month of July with two grand processions in the middle of the month — a structure that has stayed largely unchanged since the ninth century, when the festival began as a purification ritual to appease a plague deity. Tokyo, Osaka, and thousands of smaller towns each run their own shrine-specific matsuri through the summer festival season, most with fixed annual dates tied to a particular shrine’s founding or a particular deity’s rites.

Because so many Japanese festivals are genuinely fixed to the Gregorian calendar, this is one of the more predictable country hubs on Festivals.one — but where a festival’s date does vary by city or region, like Obon, the page says so explicitly rather than picking one region’s date and presenting it as universal.