Kyoto Gion Festival
Kyoto’s famed Gion Festival features dazzling portable shrines and crane dances at Yasaka Shrine, geisha sightings, amazing street food and outstanding people watching.
But its best-known symbols are the 33 floats that are painstakingly constructed, decorated and taken down again each year between July 10 and 24. They vary in shape and size, but the largest weighs in at a whopping 12 tons, their spires reaching up seven stories in the air.
Kyoto’s torrential rains and steamy heat in July make the best of us feel miserable. Before modern science and sanitation, it made people desperately ill. And back in the 9th century, plagues and such were punishment from unhappy spirits. So the Heian emperor ordered a ritual to appease them.
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