The City Festival That Made Tanabata a Tourist Spectacle

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.