‘In my DNA’: Why Osaka’s high-risk <i>danjiri</i> festivals refuse to slow down

With every crash and emergency call, the same debate resurfaces on Osaka’s streets: How to preserve a festival in which danger is part of the appeal without paying for it in human lives. The solution to long-running questions over danjiri float festivals, in which participants pull 4-ton shrines around sharp turns in a striking display of speed, power and courage, depends on who you ask. For outside observers, recent deaths and serious injuries at danjiri festivals make calls to cancel them seem understandable, if not inevitable.

But for those who sustain the tradition in Osaka’s gritty, working-class Senshu region, the danger is inseparable from a 300-year-old rite of passage.