The Sound Comes First
You hear Gion Matsuri before you see it. Somewhere around Shijo-dori, maybe two blocks away, a thin metallic ringing cuts through the July heat — bells layered over bamboo flute, a pattern that loops and loops until it stops feeling like music and starts feeling like the city breathing. That’s konchiki-chin, the festival’s signature sound, and once you’ve heard it, you’ll recognize it for the rest of your life.
Gion Matsuri runs the entire month of July. Not a weekend, not a week — the whole month. It started in 869 AD as a purification ritual during a plague, which tells you something about Kyoto: a thousand years later, they’re still doing it. UNESCO gave the float traditions Intangible Cultural Heritage status in 2009, though the neighborhood associations who actually build and maintain the floats probably didn’t need the validation.
Thirty-Three Rolling Shrines
The yamaboko floats are the festival’s centerpiece, and calling them ‘floats’ undersells them considerably. There are 33 in total — some stand around 25 meters tall and weigh up to 12 tons. They’re decorated with centuries-old tapestries (a few are Gobelin pieces that came via the Silk Road, which is a weird and wonderful detail), lacquerwork, and wood carvings. The whole thing is held together without nails, using rope techniques that get passed down through families.
Each float belongs to a specific neighborhood, and each has its own identity, its own history, its own crew of people who’ve been doing this their whole lives. The Naginata Hoko traditionally leads the Saki Matsuri procession. The Tsuki Hoko has a crescent moon and is probably the most photogenic. But honestly, after your third or fourth float passes by, you stop ranking them and just watch.
Two Processions, Two Moods
July 17 — Saki Matsuri
The first procession is the big one. Twenty-three floats winding through downtown Kyoto, starting at Shijo-Karasuma around 9:00 AM. The thing to watch for is tsujimawashi — when they need to turn a massive float around a street corner. Workers lay wet bamboo strips under the wooden wheels, and then with a lot of coordinated shouting and heaving, the float slides sideways. It shouldn’t work, but it does, and the crowd erupts every time.
Get there by 7:30 if you want a decent spot. Oike-dori is slightly less packed than Shijo. There’s paid reserved seating that goes on sale in early June through the Kyoto City Tourism Association — honestly, if you can get tickets, it’s worth it. Standing in 35-degree heat for six hours is a commitment.
July 24 — Ato Matsuri
The second procession was revived in 2014 after a 49-year hiatus, which is a very Kyoto thing to do — just casually resume a tradition after half a century. Ten floats, including the Ofune Hoko, which is shaped like a ship. Fewer crowds, similar quality. If you can only pick one day and you don’t need the spectacle of the larger procession, the 24th is arguably the better experience.
When the Lanterns Come On
Ask people who’ve been to Gion Matsuri multiple times, and many will tell you the evenings before the processions — Yoiyama — are actually their favorite part. July 14-16 before Saki Matsuri, July 21-23 before Ato Matsuri.
The floats are parked in their neighborhoods, lit with paper lanterns, and the streets close to traffic. Food stalls appear on every block. Grilled squid, shaved ice, takoyaki, cold beer — the usual summer festival lineup, but spread across an entire district. The konchiki-chin music drifts from the floats, played by musicians sitting inside them, which you can hear but not quite see.
Some float neighborhoods open their machiya (traditional townhouses) during Yoiyama, displaying folding screens and family art collections that only come out once a year. It’s called byobu matsuri — the screen festival within the festival. Walking into someone’s front room to look at a 400-year-old scroll while eating takoyaki from a paper tray is a specific kind of cognitive dissonance that Kyoto does well.
For a small donation — usually 500 to 1,000 yen — you can climb aboard some of the floats during these evenings. The carvings and textiles are genuinely impressive up close.
Yasaka Shrine and the Gion District
The religious core of all this is Yasaka Shrine in the Gion district. The mikoshi (portable shrine) processions on July 17 and 24 carry the deity through the streets — a ritual that actually predates the yamaboko floats. There’s also a mikoshi washing ceremony at Shijo-Ohashi bridge on July 10 and a lot-drawing ceremony on July 2 that determines float order. These smaller events are less crowded and, depending on what you’re after, sometimes more interesting than the main processions.
Gion itself takes on a different energy during the festival. You might catch glimpses of maiko and geiko in full kimono heading to events, though I’d caution against treating them as photo opportunities — they’re working.
Surviving July in Kyoto
Let’s talk about the heat, because nobody warns you enough. Kyoto in July is brutal — 35°C with humidity that makes it feel worse. You will sweat through everything. Carry a hand towel (every convenience store sells them), drink constantly, and duck into air-conditioned shops when you need to. The convenience stores sell frozen drinks and cooling neck wraps that sound gimmicky but are genuinely useful.
Accommodation fills up fast. Central Kyoto hotels for mid-July start disappearing weeks in advance. Osaka is 30 minutes by train and a perfectly good base — a lot of people do Gion Matsuri as a day trip from there or from Nara. If you’re booking Kyoto, Trip.com usually has decent options if you search early enough, though ‘early’ here means May at the latest.
For getting around, forget the buses during festival days — streets are closed and everything’s rerouted. The subway works, and the Hankyu and Keihan train lines drop you right in the zone. Walking is your best option for the festival area itself.
If you want guided context for the floats and ceremonies, KLOOK has Gion Matsuri walking tours and yukata rental packages. Renting a yukata for Yoiyama is one of those things that sounds touristy but actually makes the evening more fun — the stall vendors treat you differently, and you blend into the crowd rather than standing out.
For the Rakuten Travel loyalists: Rakuten often has ryokan listings in the Gion area that don’t show up on Western booking sites. Worth checking if you want something more traditional.
The Part They Don’t Put in Brochures
Gion Matsuri isn’t a performance. The neighborhood associations — chonai-kai — who build, store, and maintain these floats have been doing it for generations. The guy pulling the ropes is the grandson of the guy who pulled the ropes. The festival survives because families in central Kyoto consider it their job, and they’d keep doing it whether tourists showed up or not.
The last float passes sometime in the early afternoon on procession day. By evening, crews are already disassembling them. By the next morning, the streets are clean and Shijo-dori is back to being a regular intersection.
I left Kyoto that year on the Shinkansen with a sunburn across my nose and a chimaki — one of those woven straw charms the float associations sell — hanging from my bag. The woman across the aisle had one too. Neither of us said anything, but we both knew where we’d been.
