Photo: FIND/47 / CC BY 4.0Checked against official sources · updated · Takumi Yamada
Akita is the quiet capital of Japan's rice-and-sake country, a Sea of Japan city in Tohoku with the samurai town of Kakunodate an hour inland. It saves its spectacle for the Kanto festival in early August, when men balance 12-metre bamboo poles hung with 46 lanterns on their palms and foreheads. Your ship docks at Nakajima Wharf, 10 minutes on foot from the Selion tower, whose free deck looks over the harbour, the city and the sea.
They are not demons and they are not entertainment. On the last night of the year, on the Oga Peninsula, young men in straw capes and carved masks go house to house, shout, look for children, and are then formally served sake by the head of the household. UNESCO listed it in 2018.
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Two hundred and fifty bamboo poles, each up to twelve metres tall and fifty kilograms, each hung with forty-six paper lanterns holding real flame, raised at the same moment down a closed city street — and then balanced on a palm, then a forehead, then a hip, then a shoulder.
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Akita has more than thirty active breweries in a prefecture of under a million people. The reason is not culture. It is temperature — cold, long winters let fermentation run slowly, and slow fermentation makes cleaner, more aromatic sake.
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The dog that waited nine years at Shibuya Station for an owner who had died was an Akita. The breed he belonged to came close to disappearing twice in the twentieth century, was rebuilt from a handful of surviving animals, and is now this prefecture's most effective diplomat.
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Laid out in 1620 and never rebuilt, Kakunodate has a samurai quarter of tall black wooden walls with about four hundred weeping cherry trees leaning over them — descendants, by tradition, of saplings brought north from Kyoto as part of a bride's dowry.
Read the storyCruise seasons run spring to autumn, but the port changes underneath them.
Kakunodate's weeping cherries open in late April — among the last in Japan.
Comfortable walking, long daylight, and no crowds anywhere.
Tohoku's rainy season is milder than the south's. Good for Kakunodate.
Practice for Kanto starts in the neighbourhoods through the month.
The reason to plan a year ahead. Hot, humid, and 250 lantern poles.
New rice, hatahata coming, and the clearest light of the year.
The best month for Kakunodate and Lake Tazawa together.
Breweries begin the season. Hatahata fishing peaks.
Cruise ships gone. The Sedo Matsuri fire festival is the February event.
