The night before the festival:
a dinner of the season

The autumn grand festival of Arimatsu Tenmansha, known as the Dashi Matsuri (float festival), is where you meet the festival culture that is one of the three pillars of Arimatsu, a Japan Heritage town. It is held on the first Sunday of October, when three karakuri floats designated as cultural properties by the City of Nagoya — Higashimachi’s Hotei-sha, Nakamachi’s Karako-sha and Nishimachi’s Jingu-sha — are drawn along the old Tokaido road: bold and vigorous by day, and by night lantern-hung floats swaying with candlelight through the autumn streets.

What is less widely known is that the festival has an eve. According to Arimatsu Tenmansha and the Arimatsu Machizukuri no Kai, it has three parts.

At the Kentosai, the head and deputy head of the Bunrei-ko carry lanterns up into Arimatsu Tenmansha, and the gohei staff received in the shutsugyo rite is raised to the tip of the bonten pole. This is where the rites of the festival begin.

In the Goshinko, the deity — borne at the head of the procession on the bonten — tours the neighbourhood and is asked to keep the festival safe, moving along the old Tokaido road from west to east.

The Hayashikomi carries word to the townspeople away from the Tokaido that tomorrow is the festival. In each of the three neighbourhoods, the float crew and steering crew carry bamboo hung with festival lanterns, beating the great drum and playing the festival music through their own streets.

moss ARIMATSU, where the dinner is held, sits at the western end of the old Tokaido road, close by Arimatsu Tenmansha. You can watch the Goshinko pass right in front of you and hear Nishimachi’s hayashikomi close at hand, and time to talk with the people behind the festival is built into the evening.

The cooking is by Garan no Oyama (@studio_725), a kitchen that works with the mountains and the turning of the seasons. Seasonal vegetables, grains and beans, fermented foods and Ena chicken grown around Yaotsu in Gifu, and clear water from the mountain springs: food that lets you take in what a place and a season have in them.

To cook, they say, is to give thanks for the ingredients, the land and the people you meet, and to pass on what you have been given. Plain, deeply flavoured food, carrying the season and the food culture of Japan, meant to loosen both body and mind.

Meet the people of Arimatsu, taste the season in what is on the table, and talk over tomorrow’s festival and the town itself.