When the festivals are
We collected 529 festivals and rituals at the 120 shrines on this site, from each shrine's own website and from prefectural shrine offices and local authorities. A date for the reisai — the shrine's own principal annual festival — was found for 110 of them.
Festivals in the next 30 days
This list is built from today's date with JavaScript.
Fixed-date events only (not those set by a weekday or the old calendar, or known only from one year's notice). Dates are as the shrines write them and can still move.
Two things to know before you plan around these dates
We did not decide any of these dates. Each one is the wording we found on the shrine's own page, copied as it stood.
Festival names are given in Japanese. That is how they appear on the notice board at the shrine and in the local timetable, so the Japanese is what will actually help you. We have not invented English names or romanisation for them, because we could not confirm how most of them are read.
Spring and autumn, and almost nothing in winter
Counting the principal festivals by month shows a clear shape: 24 in April, 22 in October, 17 in September and 13 in May. Those four months hold more than half of all the dates we found.
| Month | Principal festivals | All events |
|---|---|---|
| January | 0 | 46 |
| February | 2 | 17 |
| March | 3 | 23 |
| April | 24 | 71 |
| May | 13 | 63 |
| June | 3 | 30 |
| July | 7 | 55 |
| August | 11 | 40 |
| September | 17 | 47 |
| October | 22 | 60 |
| November | 4 | 29 |
| December | 4 | 24 |
January is the busiest month and has no principal festival at all
There are 46 rituals in January, more than in any other month — New Year rites, rice-gruel divination, first-of-the-year ceremonies. And yet not one of these 120 shrines places its principal annual festival in January.
Month by month
Add the festival dates to your calendar
The 86 shrines whose principal festival falls on the same date every year are available as a calendar feed (iCal) for Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook. Each festival repeats every year as an all-day event, with the shrine's location, our source and a link to the shrine page. No times are included.
- Google Calendar (on a computer): next to “Other calendars”, choose + → “From URL”, and paste
https://jinja-navi.jp/ical/reisai-en.ics. - iPhone, iPad, Mac: tap or click “Subscribe”.
- Opening the file imports the dates as they are today; later corrections will not reach you. Subscribe by URL to receive corrections.
- Festivals that follow the old lunar calendar, fall on a weekday rule (such as “the second Sunday”), or that we placed as the principal festival ourselves are not included — see the next section. Check the shrine's own notice before you travel. Adding the calendar sends nothing to this site.
Dates that move from year to year
5 shrines set their principal festival by a weekday ("the second Sunday in October"), and 5 set it by the old lunisolar calendar, which falls on a different Gregorian date each year. Another 6 state only the month. None of these appear in the dated tables — putting them there would make the order a lie — so each month's page lists them separately.
- Oyamazumi Jinja大山祇神社
- 旧暦4月22日 — old lunisolar calendar
- Kagoshima Jingu鹿兒島神宮
- 旧八月十五日 — old lunisolar calendar
- Wadatsumi Jinja海神神社
- 旧8月5日 — old lunisolar calendar
- Izuhara Hachimangu厳原八幡宮
- 旧8月15日 — old lunisolar calendar
- Iwakiyama Jinja岩木山神社
- 旧暦8月1日 — old lunisolar calendar
Shrines that never use the word "reisai"
At 10 shrines the official site never uses the word 例祭 at all. It simply lists the year's rites, or names one great festival — 放生会, しなね祭, 市立大祭. In those cases we placed the shrine's heaviest festival in the reisai position, and that is our judgement, not the shrine's wording. Each one says so on its own page.
What we could not confirm
7 shrines state no festival date anywhere we could find — no official site, and nothing in the prefectural shrine office or municipal pages. A further 4 we could not reach: their sites are HTTP-only or have expired certificates and would not open for us. Those two things are not the same, and we keep them apart.
Visiting a shrine / Goshuin / Driving in rural Japan
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