The name Uchiwa Festival comes from an episode when merchants started to offer their customers an uchiwa (Japanese fan) sometime around 1902, and people believed the best shopping was when Kumagaya Uchiwa Festival took place. Around the same time, while the towns bustled with people due to growth of the silk industry, each neighborhood competitively purchased festival floats, which became an original model of the current Uchiwa Festival, featuring Mikoshi togyo—a traditional Japanese festival event involving the procession of a mikoshi, which is a portable shrine, and a parade of festival floats and continues to this date.
