At Dawn, 38 Mikoshi Charge the Sea at Chigasaki’s Hamaori Festival

The festival begins while the city is asleep

Before Chigasaki becomes a beach city, it becomes a city of bells. Shrine doors open around midnight. Lanterns move through dark neighborhoods. Bearers settle two long poles onto their shoulders, and the first calls of “Dokkoi! Dokkoi!” strike walls and station arcades that will be ordinary commuter space again a few hours later.

The city’s 2026 program fixes the destination: Chigasaki Nishihama beach, west of Chigasaki Fishing Port and beyond Southern Beach Chigasaki. Thirty-four shrines in Chigasaki City and Samukawa Town are sending 38 mikoshi. The first is expected just after 4 a.m. The formal joint ceremony opens at 7. From 8, the lead mikoshi begin the journey home.

“Charge the sea” describes the emotional image, not a single synchronized maneuver. Mikoshi arrive over several hours. Their bearers wheel and surge on the sand, and some enter the surf during arrival or the departure called otachi. Chigasaki City specifically cautions that sea entry depends on conditions; wind, waves or judgment on the day can keep a mikoshi out of the water. The ritual’s power does not require visitors to mistake danger for authenticity.

Three places, one night-to-morning procession

The beach is the final convergence, not the only event. The city identifies three public vantage points that reveal different scales of the festival. Someone who watches from the station encounters separate neighborhood shrines becoming a procession; someone at Nango sees streams of mikoshi merge; someone on the beach sees the full ritual assembly.

For Samukawa Shrine, the day is longer still. Its 2026 shrine notice schedules a departure rite at 2:30 a.m., the beach rite at 7, an otabisho rite in front of the Samukawa Town Chamber of Commerce at 10:15 and the return ceremony at noon. A festival seen by spectators as four dramatic beach hours is, for each shrine community, an all-night circuit of departure, purification, return and neighborhood blessing.

What is being purified?

A mikoshi is not simply a decorated object or parade float. In Shinto festival practice it is a temporary vehicle for a shrine’s kami. The procession carries sacred presence from the shrine through its community. Kanagawa Prefecture’s cultural-property account explains Hamaori as a rite in which the sacred presence, mikoshi and people receive salt water: the water removes kegare—ritual impurity—and restores weakened spiritual vitality.

The festival ground makes that theology physical. Samukawa Shrine’s illustrated history describes a route through two torii gates, a turn toward the water for purification, then passage through a third gate to the waiting places. The sea is not a backdrop. The procession changes direction for it.

The prefecture also records an intimate preparation easily lost behind the mass scene. On the day before the festival, the Suzuki family of Nango—an old local household tied to the founding legend—prepares Samukawa Shrine’s sacred resting place. Sand is raised in a square, green bamboo stands at the corners, a shimenawa sacred rope is hung with seaweed, and branches of the coastal plant hamagou are laid beneath. A yellowtail fish is offered as sacred food, followed by tamagushi offerings.

The plants make the coast part of the rite. Samukawa Shrine’s historical pamphlet says hondawara seaweed and hamagou, once common on the Chigasaki shore, continue to be used. Because wild hamagou became scarce locally, the family cultivates it in its garden. Cultural continuity is sometimes carried not by a monument but by keeping one sand-loving shrub alive.

The 1838 story: a lost mikoshi and a fisherman

The festival’s best-known origin story begins after another great Sagami rite. In 1838, Samukawa Shrine’s mikoshi was returning from the annual Komachi festival at Oiso. At the Banyu crossing of the Sagami River, a quarrel broke out among shrine supporters. The mikoshi fell into the swollen river and disappeared toward Sagami Bay.

Days later, according to the tradition, a Nango fishing-net master named Suzuki Magoshichi found the mikoshi while fishing and reported it to Samukawa Shrine. In gratitude, the shrine began—or redirected—its purification journey to the Nango shore. The Suzuki household became keeper of the beach stopping place, and its heads inherited the name Magoshichi. Samukawa Shrine’s current history says the line has reached its tenth generation.

The shrine’s account preserves sharper details than the compressed legend. It says a reward of 300 koku was offered across the Shonan coast for the search—a striking figure beside the shrine’s 100-koku Edo-period estate. It also connects the quarrel to the surviving chonmage-zuka, a mound associated with the topknots cut from men who escaped execution through a magistrate’s mercy. These are elements of transmitted shrine history, not a modern court record reconstructed in full, and should be read with that distinction.

But the sea rite is older than the accident

The 1838 recovery story does not settle the beginning. Chigasaki City and the tourism association explicitly present multiple traditions. The late-Edo Shinpen Sagami no Kuni Fudokikō, a shogunate-sponsored geography, records Tsurumine Hachimangu’s procession to the shore for purification well before Samukawa Shrine’s thanksgiving visit.

Samukawa Shrine’s own pamphlet pushes the documentary horizon back as well. A 1780 festival register mentions an offering and sacred sake at the beach on the fifteenth day of the sixth lunar month. A 1804 Shinto authorization lists the shore rite beside the shrine’s principal observances. Those records indicate that a sea-related rite existed before the mikoshi-loss episode, even if its exact form and location cannot be assumed to match today’s assembly.

There is also a devotional tradition at Tsurumine Hachimangu that places a purification rite much earlier, in 1191 and in connection with prayers for Minamoto military victory. The city labels the festival’s origins as disputed rather than treating that date as proven. The responsible historical picture is layered: ancient coastal purification practices; separately held rites at Tsurumine and Samukawa; the powerful 1838 loss-and-recovery story; and later coordination into a regional gathering.

1876 gave the rite its modern calendar and name

Chigasaki City dates a decisive reorganization to 1876. The old rite, previously held on the twenty-ninth day of the sixth lunar month in one account, was placed on July 15 under the new calendar, and “Hamaori Festival” became the established name. The year is a curious parallel with Marine Day history: 1876 was also the year Emperor Meiji returned to Yokohama aboard Meiji Maru, the voyage later commemorated by Marine Day. The two histories share a year but are not presented by local sources as causally connected.

Relationships between the principal shrines continued to change. Samukawa’s history says Tsurumine Hachimangu was temporarily treated as a subordinate shrine in the early Meiji era, later resumed an independent rite, and rejoined the shared Hamaori procession in 1923. Tsurumine now holds the customary role of sakigake, the lead shrine in the procession.

The festival date changed again in modern times. It moved to July 20 in 1997, after Marine Day had become a national holiday. When Japan’s “Happy Monday” reform made Marine Day the third Monday in July, Hamaori followed in 2004. In 2026 the movable holiday happens to fall on July 20, bringing the modern Monday schedule back onto the fixed date.

Continuity has never meant an unbroken performance. Shrine material records suspensions for epidemic risk, economic hardship and imperial mourning. The COVID-19 pandemic cancelled the beach festival in 2020, 2021 and 2022; the traditional form returned in 2023. The 2026 gathering is therefore both old and recently recovered.

Why the mikoshi sound different here

Hamaori is also a moving exhibition of Soshu mikoshi culture. The call is not the Tokyo-style “Wasshoi,” but “Dokkoi! Dokkoi!” Between calls, bearers may sing Chigasaki Jinku, playful work-like verses that pace shoulders and wake the streets.

The hardware makes its own rhythm. Local tourism material points to metal rings called kan, nicknamed tansu because their pulls resemble chest handles. They are struck or worked to hold the beat. Bells ring only when the mikoshi is carried with sufficient movement. Two main poles run parallel, rather than the cross-braced arrangement familiar in many Edo-style mikoshi. Decorative cords, shrine-colored cloth nameplates and roof ornaments give each procession a distinct profile even in the mass formation.

The result is not noise added to ritual. Sound coordinates a heavy sacred vehicle across darkness, asphalt, sand and water. The tansu, bells, chant and song create a common clock where no marcher can see the whole body of bearers. At dawn, 38 such clocks overlap.

Thirty-eight, “about forty,” and what the count means

Chigasaki City’s July 1 press release gives the precise 2026 figure in this headline: 38 mikoshi from 34 shrines. Other official notices, including Samukawa Shrine’s July 17 announcement, use the traditional rounded phrase “about 40.” A shrine historical pamphlet counts 39 when a children’s mikoshi is included. These are not necessarily contradictions; they reflect whether the writer is giving a rounded public description, a particular year’s participating adult mikoshi, or an inclusive ceremonial inventory.

For the 2026 visitor, 38 is the operative count because it is the city’s current event figure. For cultural history, 34 shrines matter just as much. The festival is not a parade company assembling 38 interchangeable props. It is a federation of shrine communities, several of which maintain more than one mikoshi and all of which bring their own routes, bearers, colors and return rites.

Samukawa Shrine says roughly 95,000 people attended in 2025. Scale changes how the event must be watched. The cleanest photograph is not always the respectful position. Procession lanes, the ceremonial ground and the path between sand and sea must remain open for bearers who are carrying sacred structures under fatigue.

After the sea, the blessing goes home

The beach image dominates publicity, but the return completes the ritual. The Hamaori Festival Preservation Society describes the renewed mikoshi going back through their home districts, spreading prayers for household safety and freedom from illness. Samukawa Shrine continues to an intermediate stopping-place rite and a noon return ceremony. Other shrines conduct their own local rites and neighborhood processions.

This outward-and-home structure explains why Hamaori is simultaneously regional and intensely local. The beach creates one temporary sacred city of 34 shrines. The departure dissolves it. Each mikoshi then carries the sea’s renewal back into a particular set of streets and households.

How to watch in 2026 without getting in the way

There is no special temporary bus to the festival ground in 2026, according to Samukawa Shrine. Chigasaki City’s official traffic-control map shows closures and lane restrictions beginning as early as 2 a.m. and continuing in some places until 9 a.m.; times may be shortened or extended with conditions. Driving toward the shore is not a practical viewing strategy.

Arrive before the point you most want to see. The city suggests that mikoshi often enter the water around the 8 a.m. departure, but also warns that arriving at 8 will not secure a view. The earlier arrivals between 5 and 7 can also include sea entry. Nothing guarantees that every mikoshi will enter the water.

Above all, remember the category: this is a rite that visitors are allowed to witness, not a performance arranged around visitor sightlines. The most complete experience may begin at a neighborhood shrine before dawn, continue along a merging route and end not at the splash but with a mikoshi turning home.

Dawn makes the invisible visible

Hamaori’s force comes from compression. Night becomes day. Thirty-four separate sacred geographies become one beach. Asphalt becomes sand, then water. A story about a lost mikoshi meets documents showing that the sea rite was already old. Purification renews kami and community; the return distributes that renewal.

The 38 mikoshi are spectacular because they are not merely spectacular objects. Each has been carried out of a shrine, entrusted to a neighborhood and brought to the place where land can go no farther. At the water’s edge, the festival makes an old coastal idea visible: power can be restored by entering what cannot be possessed, then carrying its blessing home.