Sanja Matsuri

Friday opens with the daigyoretsu, a costumed procession through Asakusa with musicians, dancers and geisha, which arrives at the shrine for the ritual that formally begins the festival. It is the most orderly day and the easiest one to photograph.

Saturday is the day of the neighbourhood mikoshi. Around a hundred portable shrines, one from each local district association, are carried through the streets and converge on Senso-ji. Each is a lacquered and gilded structure weighing a great deal, carried on the shoulders of forty or more people who are shouting, bouncing it deliberately, and being rotated out as they tire. This is the day with the most to look at.

Sunday is the big one. The three main shrine mikoshi – the ones belonging to Asakusa Shrine itself – leave the shrine at dawn and are carried through the district all day by different neighbourhoods in turn, returning after dark. The crowds are at their densest and the atmosphere at its most intense.

The shaking is not exuberance. A mikoshi carries the kami during the festival, and the violent motion is understood to energise the deity and, through it, the neighbourhood. That is why the carrying is rough and why it looks, to an outsider, faintly out of control.

Go early. Saturday and Sunday mornings are busy but navigable; by the afternoon the main streets around the temple are packed solid and moving against the flow is not possible.

Watch from a side street. The mikoshi route covers the whole district, not just the approach to the temple, and a narrow residential lane two blocks off the main drag gives you the shrine passing within arm’s reach with a fraction of the crowd. Follow the sound rather than the map.

Do not bring luggage or a pushchair into the core on Sunday afternoon. Coin lockers at Asakusa station fill early on festival days.

Etiquette. Do not touch a mikoshi unless invited by the team carrying it. Photography of the procession is normal and welcome; photographing into private houses and association tents is not. Some carriers will be heavily tattooed, which in this specific context is traditional and not something to stare at or photograph as a curiosity.

Food stalls line the streets for all three days, and this is one of the better opportunities in Tokyo to eat festival food – yakisoba, takoyaki, grilled squid, shaved ice – in the setting it belongs to.

If the festival is the reason you are going, book accommodation early: Asakusa hotels fill for that weekend and rates rise. Staying one or two stops away on the Ginza Line is a sensible compromise.

If the festival is not the reason you are going, and you have Asakusa on your itinerary for those dates, understand what you are walking into. The temple is still there, and you will not get near it in the way you intended. Either lean into it or move that day.

The Asakusa district page covers the neighbourhood the rest of the year, and the Sumida fireworks in July are the other date that transforms this part of Tokyo. Both are free and both reward planning rather than luck.