Kitano Tenmangu Baika-sai (Plum Festival)

Before you go

Sugawara no Michizane loved plum blossom above all, and on the anniversary of his death Kitano Tenmangu has held the Baika-sai plum festival for about nine hundred years.

The offerings are unusual: steamed rice mounded on two stands, large and small, called daihan and shōhan, and sprigs of white and red plum set up as kōdate. The brown rice used for the kōdate is given out at the shrine office as yakuyoke genmai, rice that wards off misfortune.

Michizane's bond with the plum comes from a legend. When he was exiled to Dazaifu in 901, he said farewell to the plum tree in his garden with a poem, and the tree flew overnight to Dazaifu. According to the Japanese Wikipedia entry on the flying plum, the poem first appears in the Shūi Wakashū, compiled around 1005–1006, but the idea that the plum flew was first added in the captions of the Jōkyū-version Kitano Tenjin Engi Emaki, made in the Kamakura period.

On the same day, an open-air tea gathering is held in the Funade garden, where geiko and maiko of Kamishichiken serve tea. It began in 1952, to mark the 1,050th anniversary of Michizane's death, and it looks back to the great tea gathering Toyotomi Hideyoshi held at Kitano in 1587. The notice for Hideyoshi's gathering said that samurai, townspeople and farmers alike could take part if they loved tea and brought a kettle and a water jar; it was planned for ten days but lasted only one.

The grounds hold about 1,500 plum trees of 50 varieties, and the plum garden, Hana no Niwa, usually opens in early February. Early blossoms begin to bud in mid-December, open one after another from the New Year, and are at their best from late February to mid-March. In early June the staff spend days picking the plums and pickling them in salt, to become the daifuku-ume lucky plums of the New Year.

25 February is also a Tenjin market day: on the 25th of every month, the approach is lined with stalls all day long.