Sunari Festival

The Evening Festival and the Morning Festival

Evening Festival
The Evening Festival takes place on the first Saturday of August. A Makiwara Boat is adorned with lanterns as it takes off with a musical accompaniment onboard, cruising up river to the Tennobashi Bridge. The other Miyoshibashi Bridge crossing Kanie River is too low for the boat to pass through, so the one half of it on the right bank rises up, granting the boat access.
The festival boat is adorned with 12 lit lanterns for each month of the year (13 during a leap year) on a vertical pole and 365 in a semi-circle for every day. Thirty small red lanterns are said to represent the thirty days of January.

Morning Festival
The following day features the Morning Festival, where a boat carrying representations of Izanagi no Mikoto and Izanami no Mikoto—the two founding gods of Japanese mythology—and a musical accompaniment. The boat is also decorated with plum and cherry blossom flowers as well as children beautifully dressed in traditional Japanese garb as it floats up river to Tennobashi Bridge. Long ago when the musical accompaniment finished its performance, the stems of the plum and cherry blossom flowers were snapped and thrown out to spectators, but in order to reduce any risk of injury, the branches are now given out on a first-come, first-served basis. The practice is known as "Nagehana", or "Flower Throwing", and if you decorate your house with them, you are said to be protected from lightning and summer ailments.