MEET IT IN 30 SECONDS
仙台七夕まつり
Sendai Tanabata takes place on 6–8 August, with bamboo displays, paper-flower balls and long streamers suspended along shopping streets. Its seven traditional ornaments carry wishes through strips, paper garments, cranes, purses, nets, waste baskets and streamers.
Large bamboo displays extend over shopping streets and arcades. Long streamers hang below, often topped by paper-flower balls. The official guide describes groups of five streamers as a Sendai convention. Colour, flowers, folded pieces and smaller ornaments create layered displays.
The official account describes months of preparation, including readying tall bamboo and arranging the hanging displays. An interview about the recovery-crane project also notes that some decorations are commissioned from specialists, while shops, schools and residents make others themselves. Participation takes several forms.
The paper-flower ball is called kusudama. The association’s history gives one postwar development account: around 1946, a Sendai merchant took inspiration from dahlias, covering a light spherical bamboo basket with paper flowers and helping popularize it. Flower balls and long streamers became a prominent combination, though accounts of their origin differ.
Tanabata originally fell on the old calendar’s seventh day of the seventh month. Sendai also developed a practice of decorating on the sixth evening and sending the bamboo away on the seventh morning. The modern month-later convention places it in August without annually converting the old date. The city publication records 6–7 August from 1910; the large 1928 event used 6–8 August.
Tanzaku are narrow paper strips bearing writing and hung from bamboo. The official explanation links them to wishes for progress in study and calligraphy; varied personal wishes are written today too. Both the paper form and the act of writing matter.
Kamigoromo takes the shape of a kimono in paper. It carries wishes for sewing skill, protection from illness and misfortune, and children’s safe growth. The official account connects it with a substitute figure, or katashiro. These are meanings attributed to the ornament.
Paper cranes express wishes for household safety, health and long life. The official guide also describes folding a number corresponding to the eldest family member’s age. Sendai’s school recovery project later assembled cranes into large collective streamers.
Kinchaku imitates a purse. It expresses wishes for flourishing business and financial sufficiency, alongside thrift and saving. A gathered-looking mouth connects the paper form with the object it represents.
Toami uses cut paper to suggest a fishing net, carrying wishes for plentiful catches, harvests and food. The official guide also associates it with gathering good fortune. Both it and the paper waste basket may look net-like, but they represent different objects.
Kuzukago collects scraps left from making the other ornaments. Gathering offcuts and keeping the surroundings tidy bring wishes about cleanliness, care for materials and thrift into the making process.
The long strips of fukinagashi represent the threads of Orihime, the celestial weaver, and wishes for weaving and handicraft skills. Streamers dominate many large displays, but the seven ornaments also include the six smaller forms described alongside them.
Sendai’s history newsletter connects Tanabata with Chinese celestial-river legends and Kikkōden, an observance associated with wishes for skill. Local customs of honouring the two stars and praying for writing and handicraft ability also intertwined with household and farming observances.
The official history cites Date Masamune’s Tanabata poems from 1618, 1627 and 1629 as evidence of observance in his time. The city history newsletter describes household bamboo displays and wishes about skills, children and harvests. The poems establish engagement with Tanabata, not a precise foundation date for today’s street festival. The association’s workshop leaflet places the consolidation of the seven-ornament set in the Meiji period.
The city newsletter describes farm households offering produce beneath the decorations, eating vegetarian food and making straw horses associated with ancestral spirits and field deities. The seventh day, called nanokabi, also led into grave cleaning and preparations for Bon. The street displays have a background in household and agricultural observance.
Calendar reform and the economic difficulties following World War I accompanied decline. The official history describes merchants reviving large decorations in 1927, followed by a 1928 decorating competition organized with the chamber of commerce and several neighbourhood groups. The modern shopping-street festival expanded through these efforts.
Large festivities were curtailed during the war; the official history records only a few decorations in 1943 and 1944. In 1946, fifty-two bamboo displays stood among Ichibanchō’s burned-out streets. Decorations also lined the route of the emperor’s 1947 visit. Postwar revival gradually broadened from commercial promotion into tourism.
A photograph dated August 1954 in the Sendai folklore museum records decorations, banners and street crowds. It documents the festival’s postwar presence in a commercial setting and offers a particular earlier street scene for comparison with present displays.
The Sendai Junior Chamber traces its Tanabata eve celebration to 100 fireworks in 1970. It developed into the Sendai Tanabata Fireworks Festival, now normally held on 5 August before the street-decoration festival of 6–8 August.
A 2010 Discover Nikkei interview records Tanabata decorations joining Los Angeles’s Nisei Week in 2009. After a local organizer learned in Sendai, Sendai makers came to Little Tokyo in 2010 to lead a workshop with local volunteers. This was one specific route of overseas transmission.
An interview on Sendai’s municipal information site describes streamers made from cranes folded by about 88,000 pupils five months after the 2011 earthquake. They expressed thanks for recovery support from Japan and abroad. Schools, parents, paper suppliers and display hosts combined individual folds into a public ornament.
From 2017, the student-crane project separated used cranes and flower paper from wire, straws and thread, sending the paper for recycling as Sendai Tanabata Iori. Uses include graduation certificates and report-card mounts. Paper folded by pupils can thus return to schools in another form.
The main festival and the planned Tanabata fireworks festival were cancelled in 2020. In 2021, the official notice retained 6–8 August, substantially reduced central shopping-street decorations and cancelled park events, while peripheral shopping areas planned their usual scale.
On 9 August 2022, Sendai’s mayor described the first festival at its usual scale in about three years. Precautions continued, with almost no food stalls.
6–8 August, using a month-later convention rather than an annual conversion of the old-calendar date.
Fukinagashi, carrying wishes for weaving and handicraft skills.
The net expresses wishes for catches and harvests; the basket collects offcuts and represents cleanliness and thrift.
Merchants revived large displays in 1927; a decorating competition and the three-day August format followed in 1928.
They thanked recovery supporters in Japan and abroad through a collective handmade display.