It was raining lightly when I reached the riverbank on a Friday afternoon in late July. In front of Oshima Shrine, in Sumiyoshi Park, several groups of volunteers sat fixing paper to lantern frames — around a thousand of them, all for that night. Nobody stopped for the weather. Along the bank, people walked in ones and twos. Nothing about it suggested the noise of the next two days.
The Ishinomaki Kawabiraki Festival is best known for its second night, when fireworks go up over the Old Kitakami River. But the festival opens the evening before, and that evening belongs to something else entirely.
At 5:10 pm I went to see one of the rites at Nawabari Shrine. Those attending were mostly officials and businesspeople: the festival organizers, the Ishinomaki Tourism Association, the city's mayor. The priest prayed at length. I left after half an hour, before the rite had finished.
Kawabiraki began in 1916, in gratitude to Kawamura Magobei Shigeyoshi, the engineer who redirected the Kitakami on the orders of the Sendai lord Date Masamune and made Ishinomaki a port. But rites for those lost to rivers and the sea were already being held separately across the area, and the festival's founders gathered them into a single occasion. The thanks and the mourning have been held together from the beginning.
At 6:00 pm, three ceremonies took place at once in Sumiyoshi Park: the rite of thanks to Kawamura, the kawa segaki (川施餓鬼) — a Buddhist rite of offering to the drowned — and the memorial service for the victims of the Great East Japan Earthquake, which has been part of the festival every year since 2011.
That was when the rain came down properly. For about fifteen minutes it poured, and then it eased.
Among the volunteers were two students from Ishinomaki Senshu University. I asked one of them why she had signed up.
"I wanted to do something new," she said. "And it's one of the biggest festivals, so I joined."
By 6:30 pm, when the lanterns began going onto the water upstream of Uchikai Bridge, the rain had almost stopped. People had gathered along the bank to watch — students, couples, whole families standing together in the dark.
Afterwards, what stayed with me was the smell: burnt-out candles drifting along the riverbank, long after the lanterns had gone downstream.
The next day, the town centre was a different colour. The sky stayed dark and overcast, but young men came through the streets shouting, carrying a mikoshi at a run.
Behind them came a second team under a banner reading tenka egao tōitsu — "unite the world with smiles." The energy was entirely theirs.
The fireworks are the neighbourhood's main event. People normally drink in front of their houses, sitting out with relatives and neighbours, but this time it poured for a couple of hours. The roads seized up anyway: by 7 pm the traffic around the venue was a jam.
The fireworks are what people travel for. The lanterns, the night before, are the town's own. What I remember is the smell of burnt candles along the riverbank.
