Published October 20, 2026 at 2:20 PM JST

In Kazuno, Akita, ten gleaming floats and some of Japan's most admired festival music fill the town of Hanawa from dusk to dawn each August, with floats greeting each other at dawn.

Quick answer: The Hanawa Festival, widely known as Hanawa Bayashi, is usually held on August 19 and 20 in Hanawa, Kazuno City, Akita Prefecture. Ten neighborhood floats parade through town with live festival music that continues through the night. It is part of the UNESCO-listed yama, hoko and yatai float festivals, and organizers set the exact schedule each year.

A festival you hear before you see

Many float festivals are remembered for their size, but Hanawa is remembered for its sound. The Hanawa Festival, better known by its music name Hanawa Bayashi, fills the town of Hanawa in Kazuno City, in the northern inland part of Akita Prefecture, with drums, flutes and shamisen for nearly two days. Local tourism pages praise the music as some of the finest festival music in Japan, and a Japanese travel magazine says it is often counted among the three great bayashi traditions of the country, together with Kanda and Gion.

Ten floats take part, one from each participating neighborhood. According to local tourism information, they are decorated with genuine lacquer and gold, and they gleam as they pass through the town. The floats roll through the streets until the early hours of the following morning, and the music never really stops.

The festival is a good choice for visitors who enjoy atmosphere over spectacle. It is held in a compact town center where everything happens close together, and the nighttime scenes of floats gathering, greeting and parting are among its biggest charms. The dates are usually August 19 and 20, though organizers confirm the plan each year.

Roots in a shrine and a long tradition

The festival is an offering to Sachiwai Inari Shrine, the guardian shrine of the Hanawa district. According to a Japanese travel magazine, the shrine's festival is traditionally said to date back to the shrine's founding in 1204, though the exact start of the festival is unclear. The oldest record the sources mention is from 1765, which shows the festival being held in the seventh month of the old calendar.

The JR East guide adds that a holiday rule from a nearby copper mine calls it the Hanawa Inari festival, and that in the Meiji era neighborhoods paraded their own floats while geisha performed on stages. Both sources say the name Hanawa Bayashi became popular in the Showa era, when broadcasts and performances outside Akita helped spread it across Japan.

A second shrine, Hanawa Shinmeisha, holds its festival on the same dates, and a Japanese travel magazine says this has been the case since 1960. The festival gets an extra layer of meaning from this arrangement, which is described as a deity of the village welcoming a deity from the mountain.

Floats made for music

The floats of Hanawa are called yatai, and they are built for musicians. A prefectural information sheet describes a style in which the front of the float has no floor. The drummers ride inside, walking along as they play, so the rhythm moves with the float. This style of float is found in several parts of Tohoku and was mainly handed down in the former territory of the Morioka domain.

A float ensemble includes drummers, flute players, shamisen players and bronze gong players. The JR East guide lists two medium drums, eight or nine striking drums, three flutes, two shamisen and a pair of gongs. There are more than ten traditional pieces, and each is chosen for a particular moment, for example when floats meet, depart or greet the shrine.

The origin of the tunes is not certain. The same guide mentions three theories: that they came from Kyoto in the late Heian period, that they were composed in the Hanawa area in the middle to late Edo period, or that they were arranged in the late Edo period from popular festival music. Some of the pieces are thought to date from the early Edo period or even earlier.

Highlights of the two days

Preparations begin before the main days. A Japanese travel magazine notes that the shrine's sacred object is moved to a resting place on August 16 and returns on August 20. The main festival then begins on the evening of August 19, with floats gathering and performing at the resting place. Around the early evening there is a station-front event in which floats gather in front of Kazuno-Hanawa Station, reportedly at about 7:50 p.m. in recent years.

The overnight hours are the heart of the festival. Floats line up on a bridge in the small hours, and in the early morning of August 20 comes the Asa-zume, the dawn gathering that the JR East guide calls the top highlight. There, the floats from each neighborhood meet at neighborhood boundaries and greet each other, and each town offers its best music before the portable shrine. The Tohoku tourism page describes this as the time when neighborhoods negotiate their passage across borders.

Special customs add color. The prefectural sheet mentions greeting rituals called Chozakai when a float passes another neighborhood, and a rite called Sansa at the breaks of the parade. On the evening of August 20, the festival ends at the red torii gate of the shrine, where floats from every neighborhood gather in a circle for a finale. The JR East guide places that finale at about 11:35 p.m., though times may shift.

The people behind the festival

The festival depends on neighborhood organizations. The prefectural sheet explains that roles are decided by age, and that young people's groups carry out much of the parading. Everyone has a part, and the music is passed down through practice and performance.

The preservation body is the Hanawa Bayashi festival committee. The Japanese government designated the Hanawa Festival's float event an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property in January 2014, and in 2016 it became one of the festivals included in the UNESCO listing.

UNESCO describes yama, hoko and yatai festivals as events in which people of all ages work together on every step, from making floats to organizing the event. Older participants teach younger ones, and neighborhoods share techniques. Hanawa fits that description well, because each neighborhood has its own musicians, its own float and its own pride.

Planning a visit

Kazuno-Hanawa Station on the JR line is the closest station, and tourism pages describe the festival area as a one to three minute walk from it. Temporary trains are reported to run during the festival. By car, the Kazuno-Hachimantai Interchange on the Tohoku Expressway is a few minutes away, but a tourism page notes that traffic restrictions apply roughly from the late morning of August 19 to the early morning of August 21.

A Japanese travel magazine says that visitors can park at a roadside station in Kazuno, which has a free parking lot of about 250 spaces, and take a paid shuttle bus to the festival. Paid seating is sold for viewing, according to the JR East guide, and the festival committee provides contact information on its official website.

Since the festival runs through the night, it helps to think of it as a two-part experience. The evening of August 19 offers lit floats and the station-front gathering, and the early hours of August 20 bring the dawn greeting. Please keep a respectful distance from the floats and the drummers, and follow the directions of the festival staff.

Kazuno and the UNESCO listing

Kazuno is part of the Towada-Hachimantai region in the north of Akita Prefecture, and the festival fits easily into a trip through the area. The compact town center keeps the main sights within a short walk of the station.

The Hanawa Festival is one of the original 33 Japanese yama, hoko and yatai float festivals on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and Japanese tourism sources date its listing to 2016. For visitors, the best way to appreciate the listing is to stand in a Hanawa street at night and listen to the layers of drums and flutes drifting from float to float.

Frequently Asked Questions

When is the Hanawa Bayashi festival?

It is usually held on August 19 and 20 each year, according to Kazuno tourism information. Events run from the evening of the first day into the early hours of the second, and the finale takes place on the night of August 20. Organizers set the exact schedule each year, so check the official festival site.

How many floats are there?

Ten floats take part, one from each of the participating neighborhoods. They are decorated with lacquer and gold, according to tourism information, and each comes with its own ensemble of drummers, flute players, shamisen players and gong players.

How do visitors get to Hanawa?

The closest station is Kazuno-Hanawa on the JR line, a short walk from the festival area. By car, the Kazuno-Hachimantai Interchange is about five minutes away, but roads are restricted during the festival, so many people use the station or the shuttle from the roadside station parking lot.

Further reading: the UNESCO page for the float festivals, the Tohoku tourism page for the Hanawa Bayashi festival, the JR East guide to the Hanawa festival and the Iwafu guide to the Hanawa festival.

Keep exploring: Kakunodate Festival: Samurai Town Floats That Bump for the Right of Way; Tsuchizaki Minato Hikiyama Festival: Warrior Floats in Akita City's Port; Hachinohe Sansha Taisai: Giant Handmade Floats of Aomori's Summer; Hida Furukawa Festival: Thundering Drums and Lantern Floats in Spring.