Sendai Aoba Festival "Borrowful Harvest Platform"

The zelkova trees lining the city are covered in fresh greenery, and in May, Sendai becomes the most beautiful "City of Forests," and the Sendai Aoba Festival, a period festival that "competes to show off the elegance of the Date clan," is held. This festival began in 1985, 350 years after the death of Date Masamune, as a revival of a festival held in the Sendai domain during the Edo period. For the fourth festival in 1988, five Sendai Yamaboko floats were made to recreate the Yamaboko procession of the time, and the procession was revived. Five more were added the following year, and another was made in 1995, bringing the total to 11.

Our Tohoku branch has been involved in the production of the floats since the early stages, and thanks to that connection, all branch staff still come together to support the annual parade every year. In 2025, the festival will add a 12th float, the "Borrowful Harvest Float," for the first time in 30 years. Creating a new float requires considerable expense. Furthermore, it requires the participation of more than 100 people, including pullers and dancers, so sponsorship is required from a fairly large local organization or group. With this in mind, the new float was realized with the cooperation of Iris Ohyama, based in Sendai, Miyagi. Thanks to our longstanding relationship with the Sendai Aoba Festival, we were in charge of the concept design and production.

*Event period: 2 days every year on the third Sunday of May and the day before.

Iris Ohyama is a comprehensive company with a wide range of product categories and businesses. Following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, the company expanded into the food industry, offering products like polished rice, packaged rice, and drinking water. Their hometown, Sendai, Miyagi, is one of the nation's leading rice-producing regions. Therefore, the company requested that the motif of this year's float be "bountiful harvest," expressing gratitude for agriculture in the Tohoku region, particularly rice farming, and prayers for a bountiful harvest, as well as the development of local industries. Furthermore, due to the meticulous production process, each new float is made over two years. This year, in its first year, the company participated in the project while the wood was still in its rare unpainted state. The company hoped to share the various stages of the float's construction with the local community, thereby helping to preserve the local culture.

To express gratitude for the rice crop and prayers for a good harvest, straw rice sacks are placed on the roof and the entire float is covered with Tenmizuhiki (woven fabric that is hung around the pillars). The rice cultivation process, from plowing the fields to planting, harvesting and threshing, is depicted using the Suyari Kasumi technique (a technique of drawing in mist to create the effect of white space), and concept design is presented as a single picture scroll.
Additionally, the concept design the Shimo-mizhiki (woven fabric that is hung under the railing on which the performers stand) incorporates the image of ripe rice ears at the performers' feet.

The Ten-mizuhiki and Shimo-mizuhiki will be replicas in 2025, but in 2026 they will be woven by artisans who also make the mizuhiki for the Gion Festival in Kyoto. In addition, in 2026 the floats themselves will be finished with lacquerware and cashew paint, the same paint used inside shrines and temples, and the decorative metal fittings and colored carvings on the frog legs will also be made and attached by artisans in Asakusa.