The Tokugawa Shōgunate’s Social Safety Valve – The Kite Battles

御所へ落ちてしかられにけり凧

(gosho e ochite shikarare ni keri tako)

„It fell on the imperial palace–

and the tako got

a scolding.”

– Yokoi Yayū (横井也有), 1702–1783, Owari

The year 1649, Echigo province. Facing the jin’ya of the lord of Murakami – the seat of samurai clan authority – live blacksmiths. From the jin’ya courtyard, in spring, the samurai children fly kites. From the town, the blacksmiths’ sons answer – with smaller kites, patched together from paper scraps taken in the fathers’ absence. But smaller does not mean worse. The boys from the town manoeuvre their kites so that the strings cross those of the children from the courtyard, tangle them, and „cut” them from the sky. On the surface, a children’s prank. In reality – the first social rebellion of the new era. You cannot directly accost a samurai’s child in the town; a non-samurai child is not permitted even to open their mouth in his presence. But you may, as it turns out, destroy his kite in the sky. The sky has no social class. The Sanjō chronicle records: adults were called in to calm the boys. And what came of it? The adults too wanted to try – only on a different scale.

Thus is born Sanjō ika-gassen. A battle in which two sides face each other: the samurai jin’ya and the working townspeople, the class of warriors and the class of craftsmen. The samurai build great hyaku-mai-bari – sheets of a hundred glued papers, brute, heavy. The townspeople answer with smaller kites, of thirty or forty sheets. Logically, the large one should win. The small one wins – because somewhere between 1670 and 1690 someone in Sanjō invents the rokkaku-makidako, a hexagonal folding kite of remarkable manoeuvrability, with which the samurai giants can be sliced down like grass before a scythe (strings coated with crushed glass were used). The townspeople begin to win systematically. Every spring. Every year. For more than three centuries. The jin’ya formally lodges no protest – it is, after all, only play, asobi, child’s trifle. In fact everyone knows what is happening. From a children’s provocation grows a safety valve for the tensions of Tokugawa society – tensions that could not be named directly.

Out of this dynamic – townsmen against samurai, the sky as a space without class – grows an entire Japanese culture. Three hundred years of kite battles: from Shirone ōdako-gassen on the Nakanokuchi River, where sixty men on one side pull a rope as thick as a thumb against sixty on the other, to Sagami no ōdako weighing nearly a ton, on which two characters are inscribed each year in blood-red sun and indigo-blue earth – in 2025 they were kishō (喜翔, „joyous flight”), in the war years kamikaze (神風, „divine wind”), at the wedding of the crown prince in 1993 keishuku (慶祝, „joyful celebration”). Four hundred square metres of paper above the rice fields of Higashi-Ōmi in 1882. Glass-coated strings and kakishibu in Nagasaki. Duels in which losing meant real public humiliation. And all of this rooted in the anger of the blacksmiths’ boys of 1649, who were not allowed to speak to their peers from the other side of the wall. Where that first provocation led, and what traditions grew from it down to the present day – this is the story I want to tell.

The Word Before the Sign

The kite was not originally called tako. That word came only in the second half of the seventeenth century, and in a manner that says a great deal about how the culture of Edo functioned.

Medieval Japan inherited the kite from China. The first written mentions are found in the Wa-myō ruijushō (倭名類聚抄), an encyclopaedic dictionary compiled by Minamoto-no Shitagō around the year 938. There the kite appears under two Chinese characters: 紙鳢 shien („paper kite”) and 紙老鴟 shirōshi („paper old hawk”). The kite was then an aristocratic toy, brought in together with the rest of the imported Tang-dynasty culture – writing, calendar, medicines, musical instruments. It became an exercise in dexterity at the imperial court, and was one of the favourite play-sports alongside the game of kemari and shooting a bow from horseback (you can read more about kemari here: Kemari – A Ball Game from Medieval Japan That Taught Self-Control Instead of Competition).

The word ikanobori (烏賊幟, literally „ascending squid-banner”) appears much later. It comes from the shape: the first Japanese kites had a long paper tail, divided into a dozen or so narrow strips. From below they looked like a squid rising into the sky – a rhomboid head and trailing tentacles. The word entered common speech in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the period when the kite descended from the imperial court to the townspeople of the provinces.

烏賊幟

ikanobori

„ascending squid”

Until the middle of the seventeenth century the kite was called this almost everywhere in Japan. Ikanobori in Kyoto, ikanobori in Edo, ikanobori in Hakata and Sendai. Then the word began to fade.

In Kansai ika remains – a shortened form of ikanobori – and so the older inhabitants of Osaka say to this day. In Nagasaki, where Dutch merchants from Dejima and their Indonesian servants flew into the sky something resembling ships’ banners, the kite is called hata (旗, „flag”). It is still called so. In the town of Sanjō in Echigo province, where the tradition has continued unbroken since 1649, the kite is still called ika – and the festival is called Sanjō ika-gassen (三条凧合戦), not Sanjō tako-gassen. The character 凧 is the same as in Edo. Only it is read in the Sanjō way.

In Edo, on the other hand, the kite was called „tako”. The word derives from the octopus: the sea creature with tentacles, known to the townspeople of Edo from the fish markets under the characters 蛸 or 章魚. The same semantic rhythm as before – a sea creature instead of a squid, a shape resembling what the kite does with its paper tail.

Why Edo in particular? Because Edo in the mid-seventeenth century was a city that had its own answer to everything, its own ways and its own word – and systematically differed from Kansai. It was an urban identity: if in Kyoto they say „ika”, we in Edo will say „tako”. A conscious, political linguistic act.

But the real reason why tako won lies deeper, and is far more amusing.

In 1655 (Meireki 1) the bakufu issued a decree:

「町中にて子どもたこのぼり堅く上げさせまじく候」

(machinaka nite kodomo takonobori kataku agesase majiku sōrō)

„the flying of takanobori within the town is forbidden”

The decree operates with a specific character: 烏賊 (squid). The townspeople of Edo replied with their typical impudence: this is not 烏賊. This is 章魚. Octopus, not squid. A different fish, a different custom, the prohibition does not apply to us. Already in 1656 the bakufu issued a second decree, this time forbidding what flies as tako (章魚). The townspeople answered again.

Out of this linguistic embarrassment was born the character 凧 itself. It is a kokuji – a character invented in Japan, absent from Chinese dictionaries. It is composed of 風 (wind) and 巾 (cloth, kerchief, piece of fabric). A flying cloth in the wind. A character invented literally to write about something that the bakufu tried to forbid and which cannot be forbidden, because there is no officially existing word for it. In this way the kanji 凧 came into use, today meaning „kite” everywhere, though it is read differently depending on the region.

凧

tako

„kite”

(literally: cloth in the wind)

This is a rare case where one can point to the single moment of the birth of a written sign – an official prohibition, to which the answer is urban mockery materialising in new writing. Edo was such a culture. It created patterns to escape the officials. It wrote new words when the old ones were under surveillance.

Before Edo

Let us, however, go further back.

In the Chinese tradition the kite is born as a military tool. The oldest accounts speak of Lu Ban (魯班), a legendary craftsman of the fifth century BCE, said to have built a wooden bird that flew for three days without rest. His contemporary Mo Di (墨翟) is said to have worked for three years on a kite for reconnaissance over enemy positions. Both survived in memory as the proto-engineers of Chinese warfare. The kite with them has nothing of play. It is a military device, sometimes for reconnaissance, sometimes psychological – unsettling the enemy with the sight of something he cannot explain.

The military kite reaches Japan. In the tradition of Tosa province there is preserved a story of the Chōsokabe clan of the sixteenth century, which used kites for two purposes. First – to measure distance during a siege. A string with knots every few shaku (30.3 cm) allowed them to estimate the width of a castle moat, the distance to the gate, the height of a wall. Second – to frighten the defenders. Bamboo whistles were sewn into the strings, producing in flight a high, piercing sound. At night above the castle, for the people on the other side of the wall, such a whistle was a thing difficult to bear.

Is this historical? Partly so, partly legend. Written down late, in the Edo period, in the climate of rebuilding local traditions. But what is worth remembering here is the idea itself – the kite as a military thing, not a toy. An idea coming from China, adopted by Japan rather early.

In the Heian period (794–1185) the kite lives at court. Wa-myō ruijushō notes its existence, but has little more to say. The aristocracy flies kites in palace courtyards, on festival days. It is essentially an exercise in aesthetics, not sport. The kite is a rare, expensive thing, the paper comes from China, the silk string is worth its weight in gold.

The situation changes in the Genna era (1615–1624), already in Edo, although the epicentre of events lies in Nagasaki. In official records there appears the figure of Hase Sahei, then daikan (代官, governor of the bakufu) of the town. Hase Sahei had the idea of attaching some dozen flexible candles to a paper kite shaped like an ikanobori, and flying it at night. The kites over the harbour arranged themselves into long lines of tiny lights – like swarms of fireflies – reaching from the ground to the stars. Hase Sahei did this for his own amusement and that of his guests, but his invention is mentioned for generations afterwards. This is the first recorded mention of the kite as a thing of spectacle, urban, recreational.

Edo and Its Roofs

The middle of the seventeenth century. Edo already has nearly half a million inhabitants, soon a million. The densest city in the world. Mostly wooden, mostly two storeys, shingled roofs – flammable. Every neighbourhood has its craftsmen: blacksmiths, potters, paper-makers, weavers, and craftsmen working in bamboo. Every neighbourhood also has its young men – blacksmiths’ apprentices, shop helpers, fishermen’s assistants, firemen from the hikeshi brigades. Each of these groups has its own colours, its own songs, its own slogans.

In March, in April, in May – when the strong dry wind from the north blows, known in the vicinity of Edo as karakkaze (空っ風) – these groups begin to fly kites. First for fun. Then for rivalry. And in the end – it becomes a symbol and a herald of a brawl.

For the kite in Edo of the mid-seventeenth century was not a small children’s paper toy. A standard kakudako (角凧, angular, that is rectangular Edo kite) measured one and a half metres by one. The larger daidako (大凧, „great kite”) – three metres by two. The frame was made from moso bamboo (孟宗竹), thick and springy. The paper was doubled, glued with rice paste, weatherproofed with persimmon juice (kakishibu, 柿澋, fermented juice of unripe persimmons, used in Edo to impregnate paper). The string – hemp or linen, thick, strong. The whole kite in a strong wind pulled „like a young ox”, as contemporary guides recall. Two men had to hold it. Three, if the wind was stronger.

When such a kite fell on a roof – and it fell often, because kites tore loose, fastenings broke, the line tangled with someone else’s kite – the damage to the roof was real. Broken rafters, torn shingles, ripped-out bundles of thatch. In the official record of Japanese tradition we find a statement that in the samurai residences of Edo large sums were spent each year on repairing roofs damaged by kites.

Samurai residences. Not peasants’ huts, not the little shops of townsmen. Buke yashiki. The houses of the warrior class.

And here lies the crux.

A kite falls on a samurai’s roof. The townsman who flew it must go to fetch it at the gate. The guard – yoriki (与力, low-ranking official in the service of the machi-bugyō, the town magistrate) – stops him. He asks for his name, his guild, his neighbourhood. The townsman must bow low, sometimes kneel for a moment. The kite is returned to him – or not returned, if the samurai decides it is his. The townsman returns to his neighbourhood without the kite, which the inhabitants of the neighbourhood had been assembling for many days.

In this scene, repeated hundreds of times each spring in Edo of the 1640s and 1650s, lies everything that becomes comprehensible only when one thinks of the warrior class and the townsman class as two living ecosystems – neighbouring, but entirely separate. The townspeople of mid-seventeenth-century Edo were already rich. They traded in rice, silver, copper, paper, lacquers, fabrics. The samurai – formally higher in hierarchy – lived on rice stipends that were in fact losing value. It was the townsman who lent the samurai money for a kimono, not the other way around. But formally – the townsman still had to kneel at the gate.

With a kite falling on a roof, the townsman received an occasion to say something he could not otherwise say. He could fly that kite on purpose. He could build it larger than the surrounding buke yashiki roofs. He could paint on it something that subtly mocked the order – for example the figure of a yakko (奴) servant, low-born, with arms outstretched as if claiming the sky (these were authentic cases).

Yakkodako (奴凧) – a kite with the silhouette of a yakko. The yakko is a servant working in the household of a samurai: carrying his bags, leading his horse, bearing the palanquin in procession on his shoulders. Not a samurai, but a man living in the shadow of a samurai, at the very bottom of the social ladder of his entourage. On the kite he is painted in a stylised kimono, with arms spread wide – and rises above the roofs of his masters. The lowest from a samurai’s entourage – he hangs triumphantly above the city.

The bakufu issues the first prohibition in 1655. The second in 1656. Results: zero. Edo flies kites on. The following spring kites appeared again above the roofs of Edo, this time written with the new character 凧, which no decree of the bakufu had forbidden. The edokko once again defeated the shōgunate.

Sanjō, 1649 – the Townsmen Defeat the Samurai

At the same time, several hundred kilometres north of Edo, in Echigo province, something happens that is worth telling on its own. For it shows how deeply the kite battles entered into the social dynamics of the era.

The year 1649 (Keian 2). In the town of Sanjō the clan authorities set up a jin’ya (陣屋, the administrative seat of the lord of Murakami-han). Inside live samurai – officials, their families, their children. The samurai children fly kites in spring, as everywhere in Japan at the time. They do so from within the courtyard, before the eyes of the townspeople.

In the town, facing the jin’ya, live the craftsmen. Sanjō was already famous for metallurgy – for knives, agricultural tools, later for Japanese cutlery (still exported from there worldwide today). The forges work from dawn till evening. Boys learn in them, kaji no kozō (鍛冶の小僧, „blacksmith’s apprentice”). These boys begin to fly their own kites, smaller, patched together from scraps of paper bought in town. And they begin to do something peculiar: they cross strings with the kites of the samurai children, tangle them, cut them from the sky. They mow down the samurai kites with their own.

On the surface, a children’s prank. In reality – social rebellion. You cannot directly accost a samurai’s child in the town (by custom, non-samurai children were forbidden even to address a samurai child). But it is permitted, as it turns out, to destroy his kite in the sky. The sky has no social class, apparently.

The chronicle of Sanjō describes it thus: the long-felt resentment of the blacksmiths’ boys against the samurai found an outlet in such a way that, unseen, they flew their own kites and entangled them with the strings of the jin’ya children’s kites, cutting them in the air and sending them far beyond the town. The reaction of the jin’ya: adults from the town were called in to calm the boys. But in the process, the craftsmen realised that adults too could fight with kites.

Thus is born Sanjō ika-gassen. A battle in which two sides face each other: the jin’ya (that is, the warrior class) and the town (that is, the townspeople). The jin’ya side uses great kites, hyaku-mai-bari (百枚張, „sheet of one hundred glued papers”). The townspeople’s side – smaller, of thirty or forty sheets. The great kite has force and mass. The small one – manoeuvrability. Logically the large one should win. The small one wins.

But not at once – only after a certain invention.

Somewhere between 1670 and 1690 (the sources are uncertain) someone in Sanjō invents the rokkaku-makidako (六角巻凧, „hexagonal folding kite”). The hexagonal form gives exceptional stability in the wind – greater than rectangular. The bamboo skeleton can be removed, so the kite can be rolled up like an umbrella. Diameter – a metre, a metre and a half. Small, light, manoeuvrable. In the hands of a skilled agetsuke-shi (揚げ師, „master of kite-flying”) it cuts the great samurai hyaku-mai-bari like grass before a scythe.

The townspeople of Sanjō begin to win systematically. The great kites belonging to the jin’ya land in the fields every spring, tangled and sent far beyond the town. The battle, begun as a children’s provocation, becomes an annual festival and a safety valve for social tensions. A festival in which the townspeople publicly „beat” the samurai. The jin’ya, formally, does not protest. Because formally it is only play, asobi, child’s trifle. In fact everyone knows what is really happening.

And it happens to this day. Sanjō ika-gassen has continued unbroken since 1649. Every year in June, on the first Saturday and Sunday of the month, some twenty guilds of the town spread out their hexagonal kites over the river, cross strings, and cut each other down. Three hundred and seventy-seven years. The invention remained. The tradition remained. Rokkaku-makidako is exported today to the world under the international name „SANJO ROKKAKU”, used in Europe and the United States.

How the „Cutting” Was Done

For everything of which I am writing here comes down, in the end, to this: how to cut the opponent’s string. The whole aesthetic, the whole semantics, the whole story of the roofs of Edo – is background. Really, on the ground, there is a thin string that must be severed before another string severs yours.

Each region developed its own method.

In Nagasaki – the most refined. The string is made in two stages. Closer to the kite: bidoro-yoma (ビードロヨマ, „glass line”). Bidoro is the Portuguese vidro – glass. In Nagasaki, the only port open to the West, the word entered the language in the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese brought glass goods. Bidoro-yoma is made thus: a linen thread akaso-yoma (赤苧ヨマ, „line from red ramie” – fibres from the Japanese plant karamushi, stronger than hemp) is stretched between two bamboo poles at a distance of eight ken – about fourteen and a half metres. It is wound around the poles in a spiral. Then it is coated with a mixture: powdered glass with boiled rice (glue) and persimmon juice (fixative). Three times. Each layer dries for half a day. After the third layer the string, when one touches it with a finger, cuts the skin – even the calloused skin of a man who has done this all his life. Gloves are obligatory.

In Nagasaki the battle is one against one. Two kites, two men. The strings cross in the air, one cuts the string of the other with a slicing motion nadegiri (撫で切り, „caressing cut”). The one whose bidoro cuts more sharply wins. The Nagasaki hata-gassen tradition is said to speak of the principle of equal strings – a fight on strings of the same thickness – but I have not found certain confirmation of this. The duel had its own code. Cutting the string by sheer pulling, without abrading it with glass (hikikiri, 引き切り), was regarded as unsporting – „that is not skill, that is brute force”. In Nagasaki the kite was flown with finesse – like a swordsman, not a woodcutter.

In Edo the method was more brute, less refined. Beneath the kite a gangi (雁木, literally „teeth of a wild goose”) was attached – a wooden strip with blades set into it. If the opponent’s string rubbed against the gangi, it broke. Alternatively – wani (ワニ, „crocodile”), a wooden clamping device with jaws, catching the opponent’s string and clamping down on it until it broke. Finally kara (カラ) – a pulley block through which the string was passed so that many people could pull it down simultaneously; the opponent’s string, tangled with ours, broke first from friction.

In Echigo – differently. In Shirone and the neighbouring towns of the province, glass and blades were never used. The line is thick, hempen, almost a rope. The battle consists of struggle by force. Two great kites entangle in the air, fall over the river, land in the water. Then begins the pulling. Sixty men on one side, sixty on the other. Shouting, urging on, the roar from the levee. The winner is the one who pulls so long that the opponent’s line breaks. After a week, piles of torn lines lie on the banks of the Nakanokuchi like severed eels.

In Hamamatsu, on the flat coast of Tōtōmi province, where the Enshū no karakkaze blows – „the dry wind of Enshū” – the battle is called ito-kiri-gassen (糸切り合戦, „battle of cutting strings”). The strings cross in the air, the team from below pulls in the opposite direction. Whose breaks first has lost. No glass, no blades. Only the force of the wind, the friction of string against string, and the skill of manoeuvring.

In each of these towns the technique gave rise to a separate profession. Agetsuke-shi in Sanjō – master of kite-flying, a hereditary function within the guild. Hata-shokunin in Nagasaki – kite craftsman, usually running his own shop, selling kites and bidoro throughout the year. Tako-no-yado in Hamamatsu – „kite inn”, the guild’s premises where during winter the frames were made and repaired for the spring matsuri.

Put differently: the battle was the reason for which an entire craft system existed. The paper guild, the bamboo guild, the string guild, the painting guild, the manoeuvring guild. Five professions cultivated by a single game.

Geography of the Battles

The battles took place where three conditions met: good wind, raw material, craft tradition.

Wind – coasts and river valleys. Karakkaze at the mouth of the Tenryū River in Hamamatsu. Echigo no nishi-kaze, the western wind blowing from the Sea of Japan over Sanjō and Shirone. The wind from Sagami over that river’s valley in Kanagawa. The dry wind over Lake Biwa in Higashi-Ōmi.

Raw material – moso bamboo, washi paper, linen, kakishibu. All these things were produced locally around the „battle towns”. Sanjō has bamboo and paper from the Echigo mountains. Hamamatsu has bamboo from the forests of Mikawa and paper from Mino. Nagasaki has ramie from plantations in Saga prefecture.

Craft tradition – forge, weaving, paper-making. These are professions in which a boy learns four things at once: patience, precision, submission to a master, and physical strength. That is, exactly the same as are needed in a kite battle.

In Niigata there lives, since the end of the seventeenth century, a tradition which the prefecture officially entered onto the list of intangible cultural heritage in 2015 under the name Echigo no tako-gassen shūzoku (越後の凧合戦習俗, „customs of kite battles in Echigo”). It includes three festivals: Sanjō ika-gassen (since 1649), Shirone ōdako-gassen (since 1737, a white kite of twenty-four tatami in area) and Imamachi-Nakanoshima ōdako-gassen (since the Tenmei era, 1781–1789, said to have been founded by a wanderer from Shinshū – today Nagano prefecture – flying kites for amusement over the Karitagawa River).

In Shizuoka – Hamamatsu matsuri, officially dated to the years 1558–1569 (the Eiroku era), when Iio Buzen-no-kami, lord of Hikuma castle, is said to have celebrated the birth of his son by flying a great kite inscribed with the boy’s name. This origin was set down by town chroniclers only in 1922, so it is not a genealogy reliable in the strict sense. But the recorded battles from the Kansei era (1789–1800) are authentic. By the end of the eighteenth century there exist in Hamamatsu already twenty-four town guilds, each flying its own kite, each with its own distinguishing mark (for the blacksmiths’ guild a little hammer is drawn, for the fishermen’s – a fish). The bellicose Mizuno Tadakuni (水野忠邦), the future chancellor of the Tenpō reforms, while holding the office of lord of Hamamatsu, issued a prohibition on „overly ostentatious kites” – which indirectly proves how very ostentatious they were.

In Kanagawa – Sagami no ōdako, „the great kite from Sagami”. The tradition reaches back to the Tenpō era (1830–1844). The most famous kite is the hachi-ken-dako (八間凧) – eight ken, that is fourteen and a half metres by fourteen and a half metres. Surface area: one hundred and twenty-eight tatami. Weight: nine hundred and fifty kilograms. To raise one such kite into the air requires one hundred men pulling on a single rope four centimetres thick. On the kite two characters are inscribed: a red character of the sun in the upper right corner, a blue character of the earth in the lower left. Each year the characters are chosen so as to reflect the mood of the time. In 2025 the characters were kishō (喜翔, „joyous flight”). In the war years – koku-i (国威, „glory of the state”) and kamikaze (神風, „divine wind”). In 1993, for the wedding of the crown prince Naruhito – keishuku (慶祝, „joyful celebration”).

In Shiga – Higashi-Ōmi no ōdako, „the great kite from Higashi-Ōmi”. A tradition with its beginnings in the middle of the eighteenth century, in the vicinity of Yōkaichi. The all-time record: in the year Meiji 15 (1882) a kite of an area of two hundred and forty tatami was flown over the fields of Yōkaichi. That is about four hundred square metres. The tradition is today suspended – in 2015 a kite of one hundred tatami fell on the spectators, one person died. The festival has not been held even once since that year.

In Saitama – Kasukabe Hōjubana no ōdako-age, „the flying of the great kite at Kasukabe Hōjubana”. In Aichi – Tahara no tako-matsuri, one of the few towns on Honshu where the strings are cut with glass (the local nankin-ito technique, based on threads imported from China; nankin refers to the Chinese city of Nanjing, where these threads were originally produced).

And finally Nagasaki – a world entirely its own. Not tako, but hata. Not rectangular, but rhomboid. Not of Chinese origin, but Portuguese-Indonesian. The model was born probably in the seventeenth century from the Dutch ship banners hoisted on the mast at Dejima. The Dutch and their Indonesian servants flew paper imitations of banners for amusement. Locals learned to make the frame and the paper, and added Portuguese glass to it. Thus arose the Nagasaki hata, a kite for fighting one against one, with a glass string, in single combat, with a code.

In almost every one of these places the battle took place on the same three days: the first day of spring, the first „horse day” of the second month hatsu-uma, and the boys’ festival tango no sekku on the fifth day of the fifth month. These are not dates for mere amusement. They are dates of the ritual calendar, on which raising something to the sky has a ritual meaning – the raising of prayers, the offering to heaven of the firstborn son’s name, the request for the family’s health.

What the Kite Said

The kite was rarely an indifferent object. It almost always meant something.

Hatsu-tako (初凧, „first kite”) was flown for the firstborn son on the festival of tango no sekku. The guild of young men of the neighbourhood gathered at the family’s house, the boy’s name and the family crest were written on a great kite, it was carried in procession to the square, and flown to the roar of trumpets. The higher the kite rose, the longer and healthier the life the boy was to lead. This custom survived most strongly in Hamamatsu, where to this day many families with a newborn firstborn place an order with the local kakudako guild, pay, gather relatives and neighbours, and go to the matsuri square during the May festival. The social component of this custom is no less interesting than the ritual one: the parents of the newborn must hire and feed the kakuyakai (brotherhood of young men flying kites) who fly their kite. It is an investment of several hundred thousand yen. The guild earns, the child is publicly named, the town knows there is a new heir. This is still a very popular tradition. In 2025, 174 neighbourhoods took part, more than eighty carved goten-yatai wagons appeared on the streets, and the festival was visited by nearly two million people.

Yakkodako (奴凧, „kite with a servant”) – already mentioned. The yakko servant was the lowest-born helper of a samurai; in the Edo period he was also called chūgen (中間) or orisuke (折助). He usually performed serving work for his master – carrying bags, pushing the palanquin, leading the horse. In the urban culture of Edo, where yakko were seen every day at lordly processions daimyō-gyōretsu, this figure took on a life of its own. The yakko became an ironic folk hero: officially nobody, in fact present at every lordly act. The yakkodako, raised above the city, says: even a yakko can reach the sky.

Mushaё-dako (武者絵凧, „kite with a warrior’s painting”) – with a historical or legendary hero. Most often were drawn: Minamoto-no Yoshitsune in armour (figure-model of valour), the faithful Benkei beside him (figure-model of loyalty), Kintarō (figure-model of childlike male strength), Watanabe-no Tsuna fighting an evil spirit. In the nineteenth century are added Yoshiie Hachimantarō and figures from the Suikoden – Chinese translations popular in Edo from the 1820s. Fathers sent up to their sons in the sky a model of manhood. The kite hung over the neighbourhood like an announcement: in this house a boy is being raised to be a hero.

Jidako (字凧, „kite with a character”) – with a calligraphed sign. In Sagami the custom is that two characters are chosen each year. In the Edo period a town official chose them. Today – the inhabitants by vote. A red character of the sun, a blue character of the earth. The kite becomes a public manifestation of collective will – of what we wish for ourselves in a given year as a community. Of what we want to write in the sky over the fields.

And finally – jidako with anger. This is an unofficial category, but present in folk tradition. Sometimes characters were written on the kite to express dissatisfaction with an official, a board, a neighbour. One stayed within limits – names were not given, addresses were not provided. But it was known that a jidako with the inscription „fool” flown over a particular neighbourhood was aimed at a particular person. There is no document of this in the bakufu archives – no one would have prosecuted it. In the customary memory of the towns, however, it happened.

The kite, then, did not only fly. It spoke. It hung over the city like a guild announcement, like a proclamation, like a prayer. It was read from below. Everyone in the neighbourhood knew who had written what, who had painted what, whose guild’s child was whose. The battle did not consist only in tearing the line. It consisted in cutting the message. In striking down from the sky a sentence written by another.

After Edo

The kite battles lived on into the Meiji era, although the context changed rapidly.

In 1911 the Austrian major Theodor von Lerch, known in Japan as Lerchi-san (you may know his yuru kyara?: Fur That Earns Billions – Yuru-kyara, or How Every Japanese Town Has Its Own Adorably Awkward Mascot), came to Echigo. He came to teach the Japanese skiing, the first in the country’s history, on the hills of Niigata prefecture. On the side, he watched the Shirone ōdako-gassen. What he saw there he later described in his diary as „a real battle in the spirit of old bushidō”. Impressed, he offered the festival a challenge cup, which became the basis of an official classification system. Since 1911 Shirone has had a ranking of places and a ranking of guilds. Earlier, for nearly three hundred years, no one formally counted who had won.

The Taishō era and early Shōwa are the time when the kite becomes a mass sport. In Hamamatsu in 1929 a new element is added to the battles: goten-yatai (御殿屋台), richly carved mobile carts pulled in the evening through the town with music, like wandering street theatres. Throughout Japan the town guilds organise themselves into associations. The ritual fight becomes organised.

The Second World War halts everything. Hamamatsu, lying near the Mitsui munitions factories and an air base, is heavily bombed. The goten-yatai burn – almost all of them. The guilds scatter, fathers die at the front. The tradition has its generational chain broken. After the war Hamamatsu is reborn quickly, but with a different cast of people and in a different context – still sincere, but perhaps a little more commercial.

Today tako-gassen is a tourist attraction. Sagami – twenty thousand spectators. Hamamatsu – two million over the three days of the May holidays. Sanjō and Shirone – fewer, more local, but deeper. What you touch when you watch a battle in Niigata today is the old Edo, in only slightly changed form. Such traditions can outlive the states in which they grew. The Tokugawa bakufu disappeared in 1868. The kite battle continues still.

SOURCES

1. 太田南畝『奴師労之』文政4年（1821）, in: 『燕石十種』所収 [Ōta Nampo, „Yakkoshirōshi”, 1821, in the collection „Enseki jisshu”]. Archive of the National Archives of Japan (国立公文書館).

2. 寺島良安『和漢三才図会』正德2年（1721）[Terajima Ryōan, „Wakan sansai zue”, 1721]. Mid-Edo encyclopaedia containing an early description of the *tako*.

3. 新潟県三条市『越後の凧合戦習俗 – 三条凧合戦資料』 [Official cultural heritage archive of the city of Sanjō, Niigata prefecture, 2015].

4. 新潟市南区『白根大凧合戦』公式資料 [Official archive of the Shirone ōdako-gassen festival, Niigata city].

5. 浜松まつり組織委員会『浜松まつり公式記録』 [Official archive of the Hamamatsu matsuri festival].

6. Streeter, Tal. „The Art of the Japanese Kite”, 1974.

7. Modegi, Masaaki. 『日本の凧』 „Nihon no tako – Kites of Japan”, 1985.

"Strong Japanese Women"

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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