Nebuta's giant lantern warriors — Japan's most spectacular summer festival
Aomori is the gateway to Tohoku, Japan's remote and snowy northern Honshu region, and home to the Nebuta Matsuri — a late-summer festival where enormous illuminated papier-mâché warrior figures are paraded through the streets to the sound of drums and flutes, drawing millions of visitors and ranking among Japan's top three festivals. The city sits on the southern shore of Mutsu Bay, is famous for its apples (producing a third of all Japanese apples), and serves as the ferry port for Hokkaido.
The Aomori region was the last stronghold of the Emishi people — the non-Yamato inhabitants of northern Honshu — who were gradually assimilated or pushed north by Japanese expansion between the 8th and 12th centuries. The Sannai-Maruyama archaeological site near Aomori, occupied from 3900–2300 BCE, is one of the largest Jōmon period settlements ever found in Japan, with reconstructed pit houses and longhouses that reveal a surprisingly sophisticated prehistoric culture. Aomori City itself was heavily bombed in World War II and rebuilt largely after 1945.