Tokugawa Ieyasu, who ended a century of civil war and founded the shogunate that ruled Japan for 265 years, was reinterred at Nikkō in 1617. The spring festival re-enacts that procession: around a thousand men in Edo-period armour, with priests, musicians, archers and three mikoshi, walking the kilometre of cedar avenue to the Tōshōgū.
Yabusame — mounted archery at the gallop — is performed on the seventeenth.
No attendance figure is collected in this pass.
The dates are fixed at 17–18 May, with a smaller autumn counterpart in October. The Tōshōgū itself is among the most elaborately carved buildings in Japan and a UNESCO site; the festival is the one occasion on which its avenue is used for what it was built for.
PlanningFixed on 17–18 May; the Procession of a Thousand Warriors is the eighteenth.
Dates
computed from the rule
Computed from the recurrence rule we record for this entry, not copied from a listing. A date marked ~ comes from a calendar conversion and the observance may fall a day or two either side.