Sendai, Miyagi

On the morning of August 6, the arcades of central Sendai are transformed overnight.
Enormous streamers of washi paper and bamboo — each taking months and hundreds of thousands of yen to make — fill the covered shopping streets from end to end.
The tradition reaches back to the time of Date Masamune, and resumed in the ruins of the city the year after the war ended.
More than two million visitors each year. The largest Tanabata festival in Japan.

The Sendai wholesale market operates six days a week supplying the city's restaurants and hotels. On Saturday mornings, it opens to the public — the same stalls, the same vendors, the same prices that the professionals pay.

Sanriku seafood — considered some of the finest in Japan — available at the rates that izakaya owners are paying. Miyagi vegetables from the Sendai Plain. The specialized dried goods and preserved foods that make up the deeper vocabulary of northeastern Japanese cuisine. Moving among the professional buyers with the same seriousness produces a different quality of attention than shopping in a place designed for visitors.

You see what is valued, what is in season, what is being prepared for tonight, before tonight exists. Sendai is known for beef tongue and zunda mochi. The Saturday market is a reminder that famous products emerge from a food culture that runs considerably deeper, and that this culture is available to anyone who arrives early enough.

The zelkova trees that line Jozenji-dori, Sendai's most elegant boulevard, are bare in December. From early in the month until the last night of the year, six hundred thousand LED lights cover their branches — not in the shapeless cascade that many illumination events produce, but following the architecture of the trees themselves, each branch traced in light so that the boulevard becomes a tunnel of precise luminescence.

The Pageant of Starlight began in 1986 and has become the defining event of Sendai's winter. The crowds that gather on the avenue on weekend evenings are large; the weekday evenings, particularly in the early part of December, offer the experience of the lights without the compression. The cold is real — Sendai in December is cold — but it is the kind of cold that makes the lights feel earned rather than decorative.

Sendai is known for beef tongue and zunda mochi, for its summer Tanabata festival, for being the largest city in Tohoku. In December, it adds to these identities the specific and annual quality of Jozenji-dori at night, which is one of those things that people who have seen it tend to want to return to.

This is the eve of the festival of paper wishes. The Sendai Tanabata—one of the three great festivals of the Tohoku north—drowns the city in streamers of colored paper, vast cascading decorations hung the length of every shopping arcade. And the night before it all begins, the sky fills with fire.

Sixteen thousand shells announce the summer over the City of Trees, as Sendai is known for its green avenues. People gather along the banks of the Hirose River, waiting for the morning when the streamers will go up and the celebration proper will start. The fireworks are the threshold, the signal that the long-awaited days have come.

Tanabata is, at its root, a star festival—the one night a year when two separated lovers, divided by the Milky Way, are said to meet. People write their wishes on strips of colored paper and hang them out for the stars to read. Perhaps that is why the fireworks here feel like something more than spectacle: both the paper wishes and the rising fire are messages aimed at the heavens, small bright hopes thrown upward toward the very stars the festival was made to honor.