Blue Festival Kuki

A festival celebrating flowers with shades of blue

Lavender at the Blue Festival in Kuki City, Saitama Prefecture (Photo: Lynda Hogan)

Lynda Hogan Jun 21, 2021 - 2 min read

The Blue Festival in Kuki City is a festival to celebrate the "blue" flowers in the city. In truth, the flowers - lavender and iris - are more purple than blue.

The main site of the festival is the Shobu branch of Kuki City hall where there is a large lavender field. An eleven minute walk northwest of the branch office there is an iris garden on the site of the former Shobu Castle. Approximately 16,000 irises in shades of white, yellow and purple grow on the castle grounds. About a 15 minute walk east of the branch office there is another lavender site, "lavender hill", at Shirasagi park. There is quite a distance between the Shobu Castle iris field and the lavender hill. However, during the period of the festival there are bicycles you can rent for free to go between the three main sites of the festival.

There is no entrance fee, but if you want to pick lavender there is a contributory fee of ¥200. During the Coronavirus there were no food stalls or live performances at the festival, but in a "normal" year there are both.

For the main site at the city hall, they generally request that you park at the Shobu Junior High School when the festival is on. There is parking for around 700 cars. The parking lot is approximately a seven minute drive from the Shiraoka Shobu exit of the Ken-o expressway. (There is a parking lot at the city hall Shobu branch office, but they use it for the festival booths during the festival period).

By public transport: there is a special bus and temporary bus stop during the period of the festival only. It is about 25 minutes by bus from JR Okegawa station east exit bus rotary. It was not available in 2020 / 2021 due to the pandemic.

Lynda Hogan @lynda.hogan

Lynda has been in Japan for 20 years and blogging about Saitama on her personal blog insaitama.com for 14 of them. Despite its central location, just North of Tokyo, Saitama is still quite unknown to the international tourist, but frequented by domestic travelers. It is a great place to experien...