Heian in the Streets

Tomorrow, weather permitting, around five hundred people in Heian court dress will walk out of the Kyoto Imperial Palace and head north, slowly, towards two shrines most visitors never bother to find. No floats. No drums. No one shouting. If it rains, the whole thing shifts to the day after, and you won't know until about six in the evening tonight.^[1] That uncertainty is part of why I like it.

Kyoto has three great festivals. Gion in July is the famous one, the one with the towering floats and the crowds you can't move through. Jidai in October is the costume parade through a thousand years of history. Aoi Matsuri is the third, held every 15 May, and it's the oldest of them by centuries.^[2] It's also the one nobody films, because there's almost nothing to film. A line of people walks down the road. That's the festival.

I've come to think that's the best thing about it.

The One Nobody Films

The procession is the public part of a much older religious rite, formally the Kamo Matsuri, named after the two shrines it walks between.^[3] The walking portion has its own name, the Roto-no-gi, to distinguish it from the ceremonies that happen inside the shrine grounds, away from the public. What you see on the street is the journey, not the destination.

It leaves the palace around half past ten in the morning. Five hundred-odd people, thirty-six horses, four oxen, two ox carts, strung out over about a kilometre of road.^[2] The whole line takes roughly an hour to pass any single point. People in full court dress walk at a pace that has nothing to do with arriving anywhere on time, because the point was never to arrive quickly.

And it's quiet. That's the part photos can't carry. The loudest thing you'll hear is the wooden wheels of the ox cart grinding on the tarmac, and the creak of the bridles. No music, no announcer, no crowd surge. People stand at the kerb and watch a slow walk go by. The first time you see it after a lifetime of Gion, the silence is almost startling.

This is why locals quietly prefer it. Gion is a wonderful chaos you survive. Aoi is something you can just stand and watch.

The Vanishing Leaf

The festival is named after a leaf. So why does every English sign, and a fair few Japanese ones, call it the Hollyhock Festival? Because the name is wrong, in a small way that I find quite satisfying.

The aoi in question isn't hollyhock at all. It's futaba-aoi, a low wild ginger with paired heart-shaped leaves, the emblem of the Kamo shrines.^[4] The tall hollyhock you might picture in an English garden is a different plant entirely. The two share a single kanji and nothing else. The leaves get tied together with katsura branches into little sprigs and pinned everywhere: on the participants, on their hats, on the ox carts, even on the oxen.

Here's the part that stays with me. Futaba-aoi has become so scarce around Kyoto that it's close to local extinction. Since 2021 there's been a foster-parent scheme, companies and individuals growing the plant and dedicating it to Kamigamo Shrine each May so the festival has enough leaves to wear.^[5] A thousand-year-old festival, named after a plant the city now has to grow back into existence by hand. There's something about that I can't quite let go of.

The Woman at the Centre

If the procession has a star, it's the saio-dai. She's the central female figure, an unmarried woman with Kyoto ties who stands in for the imperial high priestess of old.^[6] The historical role, the saio, was an imperial princess sent to serve the Kamo shrines; that line ended in the thirteenth century. The modern version is a civilian revival from 1956. The "-dai" simply means stand-in.

She doesn't walk. She rides in a palanquin in the second half of the procession, and she's the one most people are there to see. She wears the junihitoe, the layered silk court robe of Heian noblewomen, the same twelve-layered dress you may have seen on the empress doll at Hina Matsuri. Twelve nominal layers of silk, weighing somewhere around twenty kilograms.^[7] It takes about ninety minutes to put on.

She isn't chosen by audition. The saio-dai is selected by recommendation, through tea-ceremony circles and the like, from women used to wearing kimono. The announcement comes in mid-April and makes the local papers every spring. This year's saio-dai, the sixty-eighth, is Mao Shiomi, twenty-one, a student from Sakyo Ward.^[8] By tomorrow afternoon she'll have spent hours in twenty kilograms of silk, in May, in front of cameras, not allowed to look like any of it is an effort. I don't envy her, but I'd watch.

Where to Stand

Most people aim for the start, at the palace, where you can pay for a seat. Paid seating starts at a few thousand yen for the standard rows and climbs from there, booked online from the first of April.^[9] If you want a guaranteed view of the saio-dai going by, it's the safe choice.

But if you want the calm version, go to Tadasu no Mori, the forest approach to Shimogamo Shrine. It's old-growth woodland, twelve hectares of it, with trees over six hundred years old, sitting inside the modern city.^[10] The approach is free, shaded, wider than the palace stretch, and noticeably less crowded. The procession reaches Shimogamo somewhere around late morning, after it sets off from the palace.^[2] Standing under those trees while the line walks through, with the light coming down green through the canopy, is the version of this festival I'd send anyone to.

Get there early enough and you'll catch the quiet before, which is half of it. Aoi Matsuri isn't an event you attend so much as a morning you give over. Mid-May in Kyoto, the rains not quite started, a slow procession going past, and then it's gone and the road is just a road again.

That's the festival. A walk, and then the year carries on.