Tanabata

It has to be said that I am fair excited as I have booked to go to Japan in February of next year on a workshop with Martin Bailey Photography where I will be photographing the Snow Monkeys in Naganao and then moving to Hokkaido to shoot Red Necked Cranes, Hooper Swans and who knows what else. It was remarkable that on the day that I plan to knock off one of my bucket list items that a friend should tell me that they are conducting a Japanese choir at Lauriston Castle to celebrate Tanabata.

The festival was imported to Japan by the Empress Kōken in 755. It originated from "The Festival to Plead for Skills" (乞巧奠 Kikkōden?), an alternative name for Qixi, which was celebrated in China and also was adopted in the Kyoto Imperial Palace from the Heian period.

The festival gained widespread popularity amongst the general public by the early Edo period, when it became mixed with various Obon or Bon traditions (because Bon was held on 15th of the seventh month then), and developed into the modern Tanabata festival. Popular customs relating to the festival varied by region of the country, but generally, girls wished for better sewing and craftsmanship, and boys wished for better handwriting by writing wishes on strips of paper. At this time, the custom was to use dew left on taro leaves to create the ink used to write wishes. Incidentally, Bon is now held on 15 August on the solar calendar, close to its original date on the lunar calendar, making Tanabata and Bon separate events.

The name Tanabata is remotely related to the Japanese reading of the Chinese characters 七夕, which used to be read as "Shichiseki"[further explanation needed]. It is believed that a Shinto purification ceremony existed around the same time[further explanation needed], in which a Shinto miko wove a special cloth on a loom called a Tanabata (棚機?) near waters and offered it to a god to pray for protection of rice crops from rain or storm and for good harvest later in autumn. Gradually this ceremony merged with Kikkōden to become Tanabata[further explanation needed]. The Chinese characters 七夕 and the Japanese reading Tanabata joined to mean the same festival, although originally they were two different things, an example of ateji.