Nebuta Matsuri — luxury itineraries and concierge.

Nebuta Matsuri, from an operator's side.

Nebuta Matsuri runs in Aomori from 2 to 7 August: vast illuminated washi-and-wire floats pushed through the streets after dark, surrounded by haneto dancers who chant and leap alongside them. It is the loudest and most physical of the great Tohoku summer festivals, and clients who have seen Kyoto’s restraint find it a genuine surprise. The difficulty is entirely structural. Aomori is a small city at the top of Honshu, its accommodation is limited and mostly modest, and the same first week of August fills every other city in Tohoku as well.

• Aomori’s room stock is small and skews to business-grade property, so a luxury file either accepts a compromise in town or accepts a transfer from somewhere better.
• The first week of August is the whole Tohoku festival season at once, which means the neighbouring cities that might absorb demand are full themselves, and the rail seats between them are booked out.
• The parade is an evening event over several nights with reserved seating sold in advance; the free standing areas are dense, hot and no place to put a high-end client for two hours.

Basing decides the file.

Aomori city itself keeps the evenings simple, and for most files that outweighs the modest hotel standard. Where clients will not accept that, we base at an onsen ryokan outside the city and run private transfers in for each parade night, which buys a far better room at the cost of an hour on the road after the floats finish. Hirosaki is the other workable base and adds a genuinely worthwhile castle town to the itinerary.

When to start.

Twelve months. The dates never move, the city is small, and the whole of northern Japan is competing for the same week — so the hotels go first, the rail seats second, and the good parade seating third. A file opened inside six months is a file that will be staying a long way from Aomori.