JIDAI MATSURI

   'Festival of the Ages'. One of the three great festivals of Kyoto. A historical pageant held on October 22nd at the Heian Jingu in Kyoto. It started in 1896, the year after the shrine (then ranked as a kampei taisha; see Kampeisha) was built. A procession of characters dressed in period costume represents the thousand-year history of Kyoto as the old capital of Japan, from the Heian through the Kamakura, Muromachi, Azuchi-momoyama, Edo and Meiji periods. The parade encapsulates Japan's collective past, left behind when the capital moved to Tokyo and the country embarked on its phase of modernisation. The procession of 1700 marchers (which since 1945 has included women) begins with the nineteenth century and works backward to the eighth.