Tanabata - the Japanese star festival of wish-making, when bamboo streamers and paper wishes cross the Milky Way

Tanabata is a Japanese festival on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, marking the one night a year that Orihime the weaver and Hikoboshi the cowherd can meet across the Milky Way. Colourful wishes are tied to bamboo for the stars to read.

The one-line summary

Japanese star festival on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, usually early July. Cultural category, iconic tier. Widely observed but not a national public holiday.

Origin

The story runs that Orihime, the weaver princess, fell in love with Hikoboshi, the cowherd. The Heavenly Emperor was furious at the marriage and banished Hikoboshi to the far side of the sky, separated from Orihime by the river of the Milky Way. They are allowed to cross only once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh month. Even then they must part at dawn, and the dew they leave on the fields is said to be the tears they shed.

The festival turns on the number seven. Japan reads the double-seven as lucky - the month and the day both being seventh - and Tanabata has become one of the clearest surviving threads of the older ritsuryo-era star religion, in which weaving, harvest and the celestial calendar were closely linked.

When it falls

The seventh day of the seventh lunar month. Because the traditional date follows the moon, it usually falls in early July but can drift into early August - which is the origin of the second Tanabata, hiratsuka Tanabata, that cities stage in August to catch the occasion when the traditional date has moved too late in the season.

How it is observed

The custom is to hang wishes. A bamboo branch is set in water or a tall vase, and colourful paper strips and tanzaku - short vertical wish cards - are tied to it with coloured thread, in magenta, yellow, green, blue and white. The colours have set associations: yellow for the day and hope for the future, green for youth and health, white for purity and the avoidance of misfortune.

Short poems - many in the 5-7-5 tanka form - are written for the occasion and hung on walls or in public places. Families celebrate together in the evening, and because the two lovers can only meet at night, Tanabata is fundamentally an evening festival, marked after dark.

Public status

Tanabata is not a national public holiday in Japan. It is widely observed at home, in schools, and as a civic festival, and the large hiratsuka Tanabata events in cities such as Hiratsuka and Kumamoto draw substantial crowds.

Where it is contested

Tanabata is not contested. Its interest is cultural rather than political: it survives as a rare, purely astronomical festival that retains its star-religion roots even though most participants arrive at it through school tradition rather than belief. The nationalisation of the wish custom in the twentieth century, in which private prayers were recast as patriotic wishes for the nation, is a historical layer the modern festival has quietly shed.

Related holidays

Tanabata falls in the same month asMarine Day, Japan's third Monday of July, and leads into the sekku cluster of seasonal observances that the old Japanese year was built around. Like the rest of the Japanese calendar, its dates follow the lunar month rather than the Gregorian one - which is why it can drift a full month across the year even though its month-and-day sound fixed.

Sources

• Japan Travel - Tanabata(the Orihime and Hikoboshi story, the tanzaku and bamboo custom, and hiratsuka Tanabata).
• Cabinet Office of Japan - National Holidays(the official holiday calendar and the position of Tanabata within it).
• Encyclopaedia Britannica - Tanabata(the festival origin in ritsuryo-era star religion and its double-seven date).
• Nippon.com - Tanabata(contemporary observance, tanka poetry and the colour associations).