Mino Festival: Gifu’s Flower Mikoshi, Antique Floats and Street Comedy

Mino is a paper town, and once a year it spends its own product: hundreds of thousands of sheets of handmade washi, cut into flowers by hand in people’s front rooms from January onwards, fixed to split bamboo, carried through the streets for a day, and then finished. Nothing about it is efficient. That is rather the point. Everything below is verified from Mino City, the Mino City Tourism Association and its official festival documents, Gifu Prefecture, the Gifu Prefectural Shrine Agency and the Nagaragawa Railway, on 15 August 2026 — with the gaps in the official record left visible rather than filled in.

Written by Yuu — a Nagoya native of 35 years. Published August 15, 2026.

This article may contain affiliate links. See our affiliate disclosure for details.

All festival details verified from official sources on August 15, 2026.

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What Do You Need to Know in One Minute?

The Mino Festival runs on the second Saturday of April and the day after, in the small city of Mino in central Gifu. Saturday is flower mikoshi and improvised street comedy; Sunday is antique floats. In 2026 it was 11 and 12 April.

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What Is the Mino Festival?

It is the annual festival of Hachiman Shrine in Mino, Gifu, in three parts: the flower mikoshi, the floats and the improvised comedy. Mino City designated it an Intangible Folk Cultural Property in 1997 and dates it to the Edo period.

Hachiman Shrine sits at 1238 Kamijō (上条), at the top of a straight approach running south, lined with 26 pairs of stone lanterns, that points back towards the medieval castle town. The Gifu Prefectural Shrine Agency records the enshrined deity as Emperor Ōjin, the founding date as unknown, and a long chain of patronage: repairs to the shrine front in 1382, land granted by the Satō family of Natao-yama castle in the Tenshō era, and the rank of Shōichii Hachimangū conferred in the second month of 1708. It became a village shrine in 1873, a district shrine in 1879, and a kinpeisha — a shrine attended by the head of the prefectural shrine agency — in March 1953.

The town below it was moved on purpose. Mino City records that the warlord Kanamori Nagachika relocated the castle town in 1606, from the medieval settlement of Kōzuchi to a new one. Those who moved became the machikata, the town side; those who stayed put in Kamijō, Shimowatari, Furuichiba and Dan were the jikata, the country side. Both sides sent floats and processions to Hachiman Shrine, and both still do — which is why the modern line-up mixes downtown neighbourhood associations with outlying hamlets offering lion dances and kagura.

Until the end of the Meiji period the whole thing was called the Kōzuchi Matsuri; it became the Mino Festival only when the town itself was renamed Mino. The shrine’s rite also absorbed the observances of the Kumano and Jingū shrines merged into it after the Meiji Restoration, which is part of why one festival ended up carrying quite so much.

Where the flower mikoshi came from

Not from a shrine ritual, as it happens — from a drought. Mino City traces the hanamikoshi to an Edo-period rain-praying custom called machi-sawagi, literally “town uproar”, in which the neighbourhoods built elaborate objects out of Mino paper and bamboo splints: treasure ships, horse-curtains, imperial carriages, revolving lanterns, arrays of 108 lights. Paper was what the town had, so paper was what it made noise with.

The direct ancestors appeared in 1853, when both a hana-mikoshi — at that stage a plain portable shrine with a handful of flowers at the peak of the roof — and a shinai-chōchin, a dozen-odd lengths of split bamboo with lanterns hung beneath, made their debut. The two merged, and the result is what goes down the street today. By the early Shōwa period each neighbourhood’s young men were mounting 300 shinai on a single mikoshi and dancing it through the Udatsu streets.

The streets it goes through

The setting is a genuine one: the old town centre (美濃市美濃町) is a nationally selected Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings (merchant-town category), selected on 13 May 1999 and covering 9.3 hectares. The udatsu that give the district its name are firewalls raised at either end of a roof, built to stop a fire spreading from next door — until the paper merchants who could afford them started building them taller and finer than their neighbours’, turning a fire-safety measure into a status contest you can still read off the skyline.

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What Happened in 2026, and When Is the Next One?

The 2026 festival is over. It ran 11–12 April 2026 and both days went ahead, with 23 flower mikoshi on the Saturday. The rule is the second Saturday of April plus the next day, pointing to 10–11 April 2027 — but 2027 has not been announced.

The rule, and what it means for 2027

This festival publishes its calendar rule in plain language, which is more than many do. The tourism association’s event page states it as 「4月第二土曜日・翌日の日曜日」 — the second Saturday of April and the following Sunday — and the pattern holds across every recent year on record.

Apply it to 2027 and you get Saturday 10 and Sunday 11 April 2027. That is a projection from a published rule, not an announcement. As of 15 August 2026 there is no official page giving 2027 dates, times or programme.

Judging by the past few cycles, the announcement lands in early to mid March: the tourism association posted its 2023 notice on 3 March, its 2024 notice on 6 March and its 2025 notice on 10 March. For 2026 there was no notice post at all — the dates, niwaka running order, results table and traffic-control maps simply appeared on the standing event page. So check both the news list and that page.

The 2026 programme, day one

These are the times as published on the official 2026 route map. Treat them as the shape of a typical year rather than as 2027 fact.

The 2026 programme, day two

The official notices carry two warnings worth repeating: the mikoshi route, passing times and niwaka venues may be changed or cancelled, and the whole thing may be postponed or cancelled for rain.

The recent record — and why it matters

Read that column honestly and the planning advice writes itself: the rain rule is not a formality, and the Sunday is the half that gets cancelled. If the floats are the reason you are going, build a day of slack into the trip.

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What Makes the Flower Mikoshi Worth the Trip?

Scale and material. Each mikoshi carries 250 to 300 shinai — thin split-bamboo whips — hung with cherry-pink flowers cut from Mino washi. They bend and swing as the bearers move, so a mikoshi in motion looks less like a shrine than a cherry tree in a gale.

The construction explains the movement. A shinai is not a pole; it is a length of bamboo split thin enough to whip, and 250 to 300 of them are fixed to the roof of a portable shrine, every one loaded with paper flowers. When twenty or thirty men lift the whole thing and start bouncing it to the drums, the shinai lash back and forth in a wave, and the paper roars. The tourism association’s own description leads with exactly that image: shinai hung with washi flowers dyed cherry-pink, 250 to 300 to a roof.

The call is 「オイサー、オイサー」 — oisā, oisā — identical in the city’s records and on the official route map. That map calls the whole thing not a parade but 「市内八幡神社の春を呼ぶ華麗な神事」, a splendid rite of Hachiman Shrine that calls in the spring. The distinction matters at the shrine end of the day, where this is a religious offering rather than a show.

How many mikoshi, really

Here the official sources disagree with each other, so here is all of it.

Plan around the actual number. Twelve neighbourhoods took part in 2026, in this published line-up order: 上条 → 吉川町 → 千畝町 → 殿町 → 俵町 → 常盤町 → 泉町 → 東市場 → 西市場 → 相生町 → 広岡町 → 港町 — both machikata and jikata names, four centuries after the split.

The arithmetic of a single mikoshi

Tokai TV, reporting from the 2026 festival, put figures on the paper that no official page gives: 100,000 to 120,000 sheets of Mino washi per mikoshi, with two sheets making one flower. That is a broadcaster’s figure rather than an official one — take it as reported rather than certified, but the order of magnitude tells you what you are looking at.

Every one of those flowers is made by hand. Mino City records that the work starts in people’s homes around the new year, and that the mikoshi are assembled in each neighbourhood the day before. The thing that goes past you in ten seconds is about three months of someone’s winter evenings, and it is taken apart afterwards.

If you only have one hour, spend it on the sōneri — 13:00 in 2026 — when the mikoshi converge and dance against each other, competing on spectacle and sheer force. Everything before it is a build-up.

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What Happens on the Second Day?

The Sunday is quieter and much older. Antique wheeled floats with mechanical karakuri puppets come out of their neighbourhood storehouses, process through the Udatsu streets with costumed nerimono troupes between them, and are offered at the shrine.

These floats are why Gifu Prefecture has a stake in this festival. 「祭礼やま」 — the festival floats — were designated an Important Tangible Folk Cultural Property by Gifu Prefecture on 19 March 1976, and are owned not by the shrine or the city but by six neighbourhood associations: 相生町 (Aioi-chō), 新町 (Shin-machi), 泉町 (Izumi-chō), 常盤町 (Tokiwa-chō), 吉川町 (Yoshikawa-chō) and 殿町 (Tono-machi). Locally the floats are written with the regional character 軕 rather than the usual 山車.

Two honest caveats. First, the prefecture’s page does not say which neighbourhood owns which float, and we are not going to guess — ask at the float itself. Second, the number that comes out varies: the tourism association and Gifu Prefecture’s tourism site both describe 「6輌の山車」, six floats, while the 2026 official route map’s text says five floats plus eight kinds of nerimono, and the map plots four neighbourhood routes — 新町, 常盤町, 泉町 and 吉川町 — plus a static float display by 相生町. Six exist and are protected; how many roll in a given year is a question for that year. (A third caveat, on names: the official sources print the float and neighbourhood names in Japanese without readings, so we give the Japanese and keep the romanised forms to a minimum rather than invent pronunciations.)

The nerimono

Between the floats come the nerimono: neighbourhood troupes in costume, walking their offering to the shrine. The 2026 route map puts it plainly — costumed figures from folk tales, Momotarō, Urashima Tarō, the Old Man Who Made Flowers Bloom, dedicated at Hachiman Shrine along with the floats. Mino City’s cultural-property page names the kind of thing each side brings.

Those are the city’s examples rather than a fixed 2026 running order, and the split down the right-hand side is the 1606 one: machikata neighbourhoods from the new castle town, jikata hamlets from the settlements that stayed put.

If karakuri floats are what you came to Japan for, this is a modest and rewarding version of a genre that peaks elsewhere in the region — see the Takayama Festival for the most elaborate, and the Central Japan festival calendar for how the float festivals stack up across the year.

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What Is Mino Nagashi Niwaka?

Improvised satirical theatre, performed in the street by neighbourhood young men on the Saturday evening. It is nationally Selected as an Intangible Folk Cultural Property, designated 28 November 1996 — a separate and older tradition riding along with the festival.

Niwaka was a popular Edo-period comic form that swept the country in the late Edo and Meiji years and then collapsed in the Taishō and Shōwa periods. Mino City’s own account is unsentimental about it: Hakata niwaka and Osaka niwaka survive and are well known, a few other regions keep fragments, and that is about it. Mino’s claim is that its nagashi form preserves the old shape unusually well and has a character found nowhere else.

The city sets out six defining features, and together they describe the form better than any summary:

1. Performed by groups of young men from each neighbourhood, organised as niwaka preservation societies
2. They move through the town around a niwaka cart playing flute, taiko and hand drum, performing at a dozen or so designated spots — that circulating form is what nagashi means
3. The content is new every year and used once, and generally social satire
4. Casts are small — usually two, sometimes three or four — and pieces are dialogue-driven, closer to a two-hander than a play
5. Costume is deliberately simple, to keep the sense of improvisation
6. Each piece opens with a formal kōjō address, and when the punchline lands the cast shouts 「エッキョー」 — ekkyō — to close it

The 2026 official route map describes it as a tradition 「江戸時代から200年以上続く」 — running more than 200 years since the Edo period — performed in the Mino dialect by costumed young men, and suggests enjoying it the way you would rakugo or a comedy double act.

Which raises the obvious problem for a visitor: topical satire, in a local dialect, at speed. You are not going to follow it, and I would not pretend otherwise. What you can follow is the shape — the formal opening, the two-hander rhythm, the beat before the punchline, then the whole cast shouting ekkyō and the crowd going up. That much travels.

The 2026 contest was the 57th. The winning piece, from 常盤町’s 二鷺舎中, was titled 「あぁ困った、物価高」 — roughly “Oh no, the cost of living”. Third place went to 吉川町’s 松月会 with 「もしも信長が美濃市で蘇ったら」, “If Nobunaga came back to life in Mino” — a fair indication of how alive Oda Nobunaga still is as a comic figure here. If that thread interests you, the Gifu Nobunaga Festival in November is where the prefecture takes him seriously.

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How Do You Get to the Mino Festival?

By rail: JR to Mino-Ōta, then the Nagaragawa Railway to Mino-shi Station, then about a 15-minute walk. The Nagaragawa Railway publishes the Mino-Ōta–Mino-shi fare as ¥640. By car, Mino IC on the Tōkai-Hokuriku Expressway is 5 to 10 minutes away.

Mino is not on the main line, and that is the whole character of the trip. You come up from the Nōbi plain, change onto a single-track local railway that runs alongside the Nagara river, and arrive somewhere that feels further from Nagoya than it is. Nagoya people mostly know Mino as a paper-and-udatsu day trip rather than as a festival town, which is part of why the festival stays as unpolished as it does.

Two practical notes on the local railway. It is single-track with a modest service, so the connection at Mino-Ōta governs your whole day — work backwards from the last train, particularly if you are staying for the 19:50 end of the niwaka contest. And the ¥960 onward fare makes an obvious pairing with Gujō-Hachiman, home of the Gujō Odori summer dance and a pleasant base even out of season. Our guide to getting around Nagoya covers the JR and Meitetsu split that gets you as far as Gifu.

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What Should You Know Before You Go?

Four things: the streets close for hours, parking is cheap but limited, the tourism association’s phone line is shut at weekends, and the cherry trees at Ogura Park are in season at the same time.

Road closures

The organisers publish voluntary traffic-control maps for each day, and the closures are long. On the 2026 Saturday, different sections were controlled during 7:30–15:30, 8:00–21:00, 9:00–11:00, 9:15–15:30 and 12:30–15:00, with barricades; on the Sunday, 11:30–16:00 and 8:00–21:00. Both maps also come in wet-weather versions for the case where the mikoshi are postponed to Sunday and the two halves collide — so download the right one.

Parking, food and facilities

The official guidance is to park at the Kankō Fureai Hiroba car park: ¥100 per two hours, or ¥2,000 for a large tour coach. The 2026 route map plots more car parks around town, including some near the high school and the primary school (武義高・美濃小) marked 「臨時 晴天時のみ」 — temporary, fine weather only, which is what it sounds like: a field.

Food stalls are marked in two clusters, near Ogura Park and around Hirooka-chō and Komeya-chō. No official source gives stall counts or hours, so plan on the usual: they follow the crowd and thin out after the mikoshi disperse. Toilets are plotted across the same route map, which is the single most useful document for the day and free on the tourism association’s event page.

The cherry blossom, which is not a coincidence

Ogura Park is a recognised cherry-blossom spot, and its sakura matsuri runs from late March to the end of April. The park’s seasonal teahouse opens over the same period, 10:00 to 22:00, irregular closing days, with kinome dengaku — skewered tofu grilled with sanshō-leaf miso — as the thing to order. The official note adds that it may not be open on any given day, so do not build a plan around it. If the blossom is part of why you are coming to Central Japan in April, our cherry blossom guide covers the timing region-wide.

Weather, and the one number you cannot get

Early April in this part of Gifu is changeable — warm in the sun on the riverbank, cold the moment it clouds over — and the rain rule exists for a reason. Bring a layer you can take off and something waterproof you can put on, and check the forecast before committing to the Sunday.

As for how busy it gets: no official visitor figure is published for this festival by the city, the tourism association or the prefecture. Anyone quoting one is not quoting an official source. What we can say is the shape of it — twelve participating neighbourhoods, twenty-odd mikoshi, a small city — which puts it a long way below the region’s headline events, and that is a point in its favour.

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Who Actually Keeps This Festival Going?

Twelve neighbourhoods, down from a peak of eighteen. That figure is the single most revealing thing in the official and press record, and it explains why the number of mikoshi in any given year is a moving target rather than a fixed one.

I have not been to this one myself, so rather than invent an experience, here is what the record actually shows.

Reporting from the 2026 festival, Tokai TV put the decline plainly: eighteen neighbourhoods took part at the peak; twelve did in 2026. The chairman of the Mino Festival Executive Committee, Kobayashi Takao, 74, explained it as arithmetic rather than sentiment — the burden falls on older residents, and neighbourhoods with too few households drop out. That is a broadcaster’s reporting rather than an official statement, attributed as such.

Set that against the other numbers on this page and you get the real story. Somewhere between 100,000 and 120,000 sheets of handmade paper per mikoshi. Flowers cut by hand in front rooms from January. Assembly the day before. Three months of work, one day of use, in a small city where the number of neighbourhoods able to field a mikoshi has fallen by a third. Whether the 2027 edition has twenty-three mikoshi or nineteen is not a detail — it is the whole question.

Where to see it before you commit

The official channels are the honest way to gauge the atmosphere without lifting anyone’s photographs, and in 2026 they doubled as the live information feed — the organisers announced that flower-mikoshi passing information on the Saturday would be posted to them:

• Mino City Tourism Association on Instagram: @mino.kanko
• Mino City on Facebook: facebook.com/mino.city
• Tokai TV’s April 2026 report, if you want moving pictures of the sōneri and the flower-making, with the participation figures quoted above: tokai-tv.com

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Frequently Asked Questions

When is the Mino Festival held?

On the second Saturday of April and the following Sunday, two days, every year. In 2026 that was 11 and 12 April, and both days went ahead. Applying the same rule to 2027 gives Saturday 10 and Sunday 11 April 2027, but as of 15 August 2026 the 2027 edition has not been announced.

What is a hanamikoshi, and how is it made?

A portable shrine roofed with 250 to 300 shinai, thin lengths of split bamboo, each hung with cherry-pink flowers made from Mino washi paper. Mino City traces the form to a rain-praying custom called machi-sawagi, and dates the first flower mikoshi and shinai lanterns to 1853. Tokai TV reported in April 2026 that a single mikoshi uses 100,000 to 120,000 sheets of Mino washi, two sheets per flower.

How many flower mikoshi are there?

23 in 2026, according to Mino City’s own report on the festival. The official sources give different general figures: the 2026 route map says over 20 large and small mikoshi, while the tourism association’s standing description says up to 30-odd. The actual 2026 count is the number to plan around.

Is there an admission charge for the Mino Festival?

No admission information of any kind appears on any official page — not on Mino City’s, not on the tourism association’s, not in the official posters, and the prefectural tourism site has no price field for it either. It is a street and shrine festival with no published ticketing, but rather than assert that it is free, we are telling you what the official record does and does not say.

Should I go on the Saturday or the Sunday?

Saturday if you want the flower mikoshi and the improvised comedy, which is what most people come for; the 2026 climax, the souneri massed dance, was at 13:00 and the indoor niwaka contest ran 18:00 to 19:50. Sunday if you want the six antique floats and the nerimono costume processions, which in 2026 passed the Udatsu townscape around 12:00 to 12:30 and were offered at the shrine from 12:45.

How do I get to the Mino Festival from Nagoya?

Take a JR train to Mino-Ota, change to the Nagaragawa Railway and ride to Mino-shi Station, then walk about 15 minutes to the festival area. The Nagaragawa Railway publishes the Mino-Ota to Mino-shi fare as ¥640. We do not quote a total from Nagoya because the JR leg could not be confirmed from the operator’s own published data on 15 August 2026.

Is the paper used for the flowers the UNESCO-listed washi?

Not as far as any official source states. What UNESCO inscribed in 2014 is Washi, craftsmanship of traditional Japanese hand-made paper, and it covers three techniques: Sekishu-banshi, Hon-minoshi and Hosokawa-shi. Mino’s component is hon-minoshi specifically, not Mino washi in general, and no official page connects the mikoshi flowers to hon-minoshi. The flowers are described simply as Mino washi.

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Where Can You Check Official Information?

Four official sources cover this festival, plus two phone numbers — and one scheduling trap, below, before you rely on the phone.

• Mino City Tourism Association, festival event page: https://minokanko.com/event/category/spring/p6009/ — the single most useful page. This is where the official poster, the route map, the traffic-control maps for both days (plus their wet-weather variants) and the niwaka contest results are published as PDFs
• Mino City, on the festival as a designated cultural property: https://www.city.mino.gifu.jp/docs/2361.html, and on the niwaka: https://www.city.mino.gifu.jp/docs/1219.html. The city also publishes a post-festival report each year — the 2026 one is the source of the 23-mikoshi figure
• Gifu Prefecture, Cultural Heritage Division, on the six designated floats: https://www.pref.gifu.lg.jp/page/6699.html
• Gifu Prefecture’s official tourism site, event listing: https://www.kankou-gifu.jp/event/detail_1307.html
• Nagaragawa Railway, published fare table: http://www.nagatetsu.co.jp/guide/fare/
• Enquiries: Mino City Hall — General Affairs Division for the mikoshi, floats and nerimono, and the Mino Washi Promotion Division for the niwaka, both on 0575-33-1122. Mino City Tourism Association: 0575-35-3660
• Live updates on the day: @mino.kanko on Instagram and Mino City on Facebook

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Related Guides

• Central Japan Festival Calendar — every major festival in the region, month by month, and the place to start if you are building a trip around one
• Mino Washi Akari Art Exhibition — the same streets, the same paper, in autumn and after dark. If you want Mino at its most photogenic, this is the other date
• Gujō Odori — further up the same railway line, a summer dance you join rather than watch
• Takayama Festival — the most elaborate karakuri floats in the country, also in April, and the obvious alternative if the floats are your priority
• Gifu Nobunaga Festival — Gifu’s big autumn event, and the reason Nobunaga keeps turning up in the niwaka scripts
• Gifu City Day Trip from Nagoya — the Nagara river, the old merchant quarter and what else the prefecture’s capital offers
• Nagara River Cormorant Fishing — the same city’s other signature tradition, running nightly from 11 May once the spring festival season has passed
• Cherry Blossom in Nagoya & Central Japan — timing the blossom, which in early April is running at the same moment as this festival
• Getting Around Nagoya — trains, IC cards and the network you need to get as far as Gifu in the first place