Sendai Aoba Festival "Borrowful Harvest Platform"

In May, when the zelkova trees lining the streets are covered in fresh green leaves and Sendai becomes its most beautiful "City of Trees," the "Sendai Aoba Festival," a historical festival showcasing the refined elegance of the Date clan, is held. This festival began in 1985, the 350th anniversary of the death of Date Masamune, as a revival of a festival from the Edo period Sendai domain. For the fourth festival in 1988, five Sendai Yamaboko floats were created to recreate the procession of floats from that time, and the procession was revived. Five more floats were added the following year, and one more was created in 1995, bringing the total to eleven.

Our Tohoku branch has been involved in the creation of the floats from the very beginning, and because of that connection, our branch staff still work together every year to support the procession. And in 2025, for the first time in 30 years, a 12th float, the "Gokoku Hojo Yamahoko" (Harvest Float), will be added to the festival. Creating a new float requires considerable expense. Furthermore, with the participation of more than 100 people, including the pullers and dancers, sponsorship requires a fairly large local organization or group. In this context, with the cooperation of Iris Ohyama, which has its base in Sendai, Miyagi, the new float has become a reality. Due to our long-standing relationship with the "Sendai Aoba Festival," our company was in charge of concept design and production of the float.

*Event period: 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.

With gratitude for rice cultivation and prayers for a bountiful harvest, rice bales were placed on the roof, and the entire float was covered with tenmizuhiki (woven fabrics decorating the pillars). The design depicts the stages of rice cultivation, from plowing and planting to harvesting and threshing, as a single picture scroll, using techniques such as suyari-kasumi (a concept design that uses mist to create an effect of negative space).
Furthermore, concept design of the lower mizuhiki (the woven fabric that adorns the area beneath the railing where the performers stand) incorporates the image of ripe rice stalks at the feet of the performers.

The upper and lower decorative cords will be replicas in 2025, but in 2026 they will be made as textiles by artisans who also produce the decorative cords for Kyoto's Gion Festival. In addition, in 2026 the float itself will be finished with cashew lacquer, which is used in lacquerware and the interiors of shrines and temples, and the decorative metalwork and the colored carvings of the brackets will be made and installed by artisans from Asakusa.