Rapidly changing times notwithstanding, in an 1100+-year event like the Gion Festival, transformation can be radical.
The year 2014 heralded the reinstitution of the Gion Festival’s annual processions to two parts, one on the 17th and another on the 24th.
Why do we care about dates and parts? Well, on the surface of things, there’s a tremendous amount of richness to the festival, and trying to enjoy and learn from it all in just the short five days when the float treasures have been on display (11-17 July) for the last half-century is an impossible (and sweaty) undertaking.
Since 2014 we can enjoy nearly double the time (11-17 and 21-24 July) to soak up the wealth of culture, history and cosmology, which spans centuries, countries and traditions. Read more about this under the individual floats’ pages by clicking on the links in the dropdown menus at right.
Looking more deeply, restoring the two processions has profound implications. Festival elders have told me that they were amalgamated into one procession and the traditional route changed in the 1960s, to cause less disturbance to the downtown traffic.
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