Sanja Matsuri

The Sanja Matsuri is the grand annual festival held every May at Asakusa Shrine in Asakusa, Taitō Ward, Tokyo. Known as a spirited festival representative of the downtown of old Edo, it bustles with around 1.8 million visitors each year, making it an early-summer tradition representative of Tokyo. "Sanja" (three shrines) derives from the enshrining as deities of three figures said to have been involved in the founding of Sensō-ji Temple.

The festival's greatest distinction is, above all, its spirited portable shrines (mikoshi). The Sanja Matsuri is a "mikoshi festival" in which portable shrines, rather than floats, are the stars, with around 100 neighborhood mikoshi parading through the town of Asakusa. The sight of bearers jostling and hoisting the mikoshi to the rousing chant of "soiya, soiya" is full of intensity, with the spirit of the Edokko (true Tokyoites) bursting forth. On the final day, the three main shrine mikoshi of Asakusa Shrine are carried out, and the festival reaches its peak.

Asakusa, which flourished as the temple-gate town of Sensō-ji, has been a center of common culture since the Edo period, and its vitality and human warmth are vividly expressed in the Sanja Matsuri. The spectacle of countless mikoshi being spiritedly carried about against the backdrop of the Nakamise shopping street and Sensō-ji Temple is the very essence of a downtown festival. Conveying to this day the chic and dashing tradition of Edo festivals, the Sanja Matsuri is a major early-summer festival symbolizing the pride of the people of Asakusa and the vitality of Tokyo's downtown.