Naha Great Tug-of-War

Naha Great Tug-of-War, rooted in fifteenth-century Okinawan rain and harvest rituals and formally codified in an 1812 rulebook, was revived in 1971 after wartime disruption and now features a Guinness-certified rope of more than forty metric tons. Held each October, the festival draws roughly 275,000 attendees with up to fifteen thousand participants pulling on each side.

Naha Great Tug-of-War traces roots to rural rain-and-harvest rituals practiced across Okinawa since at least the fifteenth century, when local communities pulled ropes in ceremonies meant to petition the gods for favorable weather and plentiful crops, a folk custom that gradually formalized into competitive tug-of-war contests between neighboring districts over subsequent centuries.