Guzu-yaki Festival
ぐず焼まつり
Late August 2027
Kaga, Ishikawa
The dates for this event have not been confirmed yet. They are an estimate from the event’s own pattern, and this page is updated as soon as the organiser announces the real ones — check the official site for the latest. Last held 29–30 August 2026.
Guzu-yaki is the night Kaga burns its bad luck. A guzu is a donko, the blunt-headed freshwater goby of the local rivers, and in Iburihashi it stands for everything that can go wrong in a year: sickness, a failed harvest, plain ill fortune. For a week beforehand the town's young men build one on a wooden frame, dressing it in bamboo and straw until it runs seven or eight metres from its gaping toothed mouth to its tail.
On the Saturday evening, from around 17:00, fifty or sixty men and boys shoulder the thing and carry it down the single narrow street of what was a post station on the old Hokuriku road, chanting as they go. Three guzu converge on the square in front of Iburihashi Station at about 19:00 for the meeting the crowd comes for, and are then hauled up to Furihashi Shrine, swung around a bonfire in the tree-dark precinct and thrown into it. The ring dance to Furihashi-bushi goes on under the sparks long after. The Sunday closes with fireworks at about 21:00.
Iburihashi Station is one stop from Kaga-Onsen, the shinkansen stop for the Kaga hot-spring towns, on the IR Ishikawa Railway, and the whole festival is free to watch from the street. Come on the Saturday if you have only one night — that is when the guzu burn. The lane is narrow and the crowd stands close to something genuinely on fire, so keep children in hand and give the carriers room.