Gion Matsuri 2022: How Will It Look? | Gionfestival.org

Gion Festival fans around the world are wondering: will there be a Gion Matsuri 2022? What kind of shape will it take?

We won’t know until the Gion Matsuri Yamaboko Rengokai (Gion Festival Floats Association) makes an official announcement to the press, probably in early May. Until then, even the yamaboko floats communities don’t know for sure.

The Gion Matsuri’s roots go back to the 9th century. They formed around ending and warding off epidemics (read more about this in my book). Plagues were a regular problem in Kyoto, because of rainy-season conditions: heat, humidity, standing water, and a dense population. Also, this was before modern sanitation. Until antibiotics became available in Japan in the mid-20th century, Kyotoites still died of the “summer sickness.”

Gion Matsuri elders hold and transmit the matsuri’s traditions, which are largely experiential and oral. When these elders were children, family members and friends died of the summer sickness. So they still strongly feel that this is the Gion Festival’s raison d’ȇtre. To them, suspending the Gion Matsuri due to an epidemic is painfully ironic.

“It feels devastating that the Gion Festival has been suspended for two years in a row due to covid,” shared a former director of a Gion Festival float. “This is precisely the time for us to demonstrate the true power of this epidemic-eradicating festival. I’m praying for an end to the epidemic.”

Gion Festival 2022: Who Decides What It Looks Like?

The Gion Festival’s structure is one of its most interesting features. Like an ecosystem or the human body, it’s a massive, semi-autonomous, interdependent, self-organizing system.

Yasaka Shrine is the parent shrine and determines what happens with the main Gion Matsuri deities. Yasaka Shrine has major input into, for example, whether and in what form its deities get transported off the Yasaka Shrine grounds. The Yasaka Shrine deities’ visit to downtown Kyoto comprises the spiritual heart of the Gion Matsuri

Read More: https://www.gionfestival.org/gion-matsuri-2022-prospect/