Miyajima Kangensai

Miyajima Kangensai is a maritime Shinto ritual founded around 1146 by Taira no Kiyomori, adapting Kyoto court music into a religious ceremony performed on boats near Itsukushima Shrine. Held on the seventeenth day of the sixth lunar month, musicians play classical kangen music through the night as decorated boats glide past the shrine's floating torii, climaxing in a precise triple-spin maneuver in a narrow shrine corridor.

Taira no Kiyomori, appointed governor of Aki Province in the mid-twelfth century and the powerful patron behind the construction of Itsukushima Shrine on the island of Miyajima, is credited with founding the Kangensai ritual around 1146 by adapting kangen, a refined musical entertainment that had circulated among the Kyoto imperial court since the tenth and eleventh centuries, into a full religious ceremony performed on the open waters of the Seto Inland Sea rather than the calm garden ponds where such music had traditionally been enjoyed.