Sendai Tanabata Matsuri — luxury itineraries and concierge.

Sendai Tanabata Matsuri, from an operator's side.

Sendai Tanabata hangs the covered shopping arcades of the city centre with fukinagashi — vast paper-and-bamboo streamers made by hand each year by the merchants beneath them — across 6, 7 and 8 August. Unlike almost every other great Tohoku festival it happens in daylight and under cover, which removes the weather risk and the night-time transfer problem in one stroke. The trade-off is that it is a walking festival with no parade, no seating and no obvious climax, so a client left to wander the arcades alone will describe it afterwards as a shopping street with decorations.

• There is nothing to buy a seat for, so the entire quality of the experience rests on timing, routing and interpretation rather than on ticketing.
• Sendai sits at the centre of the first week of August, when Aomori, Akita, Morioka and Yamagata are all running at once and the Tohoku Shinkansen reserved seats between them are taken well ahead.
• The arcades are densest in the middle of the day and the streamers are at their best before the crowd arrives, which means an early start that has to be sold to the client in advance rather than sprung on them.

Basing decides the file.

Central Sendai around the station and Ichibancho keeps clients inside walking distance of every arcade, and the city holds more and better rooms than any other Tohoku festival host. That is the real argument for anchoring a Tohoku August circuit here and running out to the neighbouring cities rather than chasing beds around the region.

When to start.

Twelve months, because the constraint is the region rather than the city. Sendai itself has depth of inventory; the rail seats and the hotels in Aomori, Akita and Morioka that a Tohoku circuit needs do not, and they are gone long before the summer.