The story
Akita Kanto Festival in Akita
Akita Kanto Festival fills the city's main street each August 3 through 6 with roughly two hundred lantern-hung poles, some reaching twelve meters and carrying forty-six lanterns, balanced by performers on the palm, forehead, shoulder, or lower back. Rooted in a mid-Edo-period harvest ritual, it ranks among Tohoku's three great summer festivals.
Akita Kanto Festival traces its roots to the mid-Edo period, most commonly dated to the Horeki era of the 1750s, when it is believed to have developed from an older Tanabata-related purification custom known as neburi nagashi, in which lanterns or ritual objects were floated away on water to carry off summer illness and drowsiness before the demands of the autumn harvest.