Hirosaki, Aomori

Where Aomori's Nebuta moves fast and loud, Hirosaki's Neputa is slow and contemplative.
The floats are fan-shaped — painted on one side with warriors from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms or Water Margin, and on the other with serene portraits of women. Front and back are meant to be read as a single work: the violence of battle, and the stillness that follows.
The sound that carries the procession is the tsugaru joppari great drum — joppari meaning stubborn, or unyielding, a word the people of Tsugaru use to describe themselves. The drum is deep and unhurried, and it sets the pace for everything.
Records show that the fifth lord of the Hirosaki domain watched a neputa procession in 1722. The festival grew from the culture of a castle town, shaped by samurai aesthetics and a long winter's worth of accumulated energy.
Thirty kilometers separate Hirosaki from Aomori city.
Same prefecture, same summer, an entirely different festival — and an entirely different sense of what a festival can be.
A national intangible folk cultural property.

The castle comes second here. The blossoms come first.

Hirosaki Park holds some twenty-six hundred cherry trees, and many are old—older than the festival, older than most who come to stand beneath them. What makes them strange is the pruning. The orchardists of Aomori, a province that lives by its apples, learned to cut a fruit tree so that every branch carries weight, and somewhere along the way they turned that knowledge on the cherries. The result is a blossom denser than seems reasonable: low, heavy, dropping to the height of a person, so you walk through the flowers rather than under them.

Then the petals fall. They fall into the moat, and the moat changes color, and a word exists for this—hanaikada, a raft of flowers—because people here have looked long enough to name it. Some who return each year say the trees are best not at full bloom but a few days after, when the water has gone pale and the falling has become the point. On a still morning the moat doubles the blossom: once above, once below.

At night the keep floats on its own light. Far off, Mount Iwaki keeps its snow. Spring reaches Hirosaki three weeks later than Tokyo, so the peak comes in early May, when much of the country has already moved on. There is something to be said for a place still waiting.

Hirosaki is the center of Japan's apple-growing region, and the market at Dotecho brings this fact into the city with a directness that supermarket labeling cannot replicate. The varieties on offer — Jonagold, Fuji, Orin, Mutsu, and others specific to particular growers and elevations — are not abstractions but objects with specific tastes and textures, sold by people who can explain the differences.

The market runs on weekends from April through November, which means it overlaps with the famous cherry blossom season at Hirosaki Castle. Many visitors who come for the sakura discover the market and find it as memorable as the blossoms. But the market continues after the cherry trees have finished, and the autumn apple season — when the varieties that need the longest growing time finally mature — is perhaps the best time to come specifically for the produce.

Hirosaki has other things to recommend it: the castle, the Western-style Meiji-era architecture, the traditional craft of kogin embroidery. The market integrates with all of these rather than competing. It is the place where the agricultural identity of the surrounding region becomes available in the city center.