1,000,000 Tulips and 500,000 Sunflowers
Tanto Sunflower Festival
The Tanto Sunflower Festival, held every summer in the Tanto Flower Park since 2001, welcomes visitors to admire the beautiful scenery of over 500,000 sunflowers.
*Please check out our events section for updates regarding the yearly Tanto Sunflower Festival.
The Tanto region is covered with broad swaths of farmland, making it ideal for growing flowers and other field crops. Tanto is renowned for its Tanto Tulip Festival in April, which features about a million tulips of over 300 varieties at the Tanto Flower Park. The highlight of this colorful festival is the stunning tulip art, which uses around 100,000 tulips to depict iconic Japanese themes, such as traditional daruma dolls, local mascots, and cartoon characters. Aside from the flowers, the family-friendly festival also features photo contests, a local bazaar, and food stalls.
After a tulip-filled spring, the area provides a haven in summer for many other flowers as well as for rice-field art, in which rice paddies are turned into canvases for art created by ancient grain plants. The rice field art showcases pictures created from five kinds of ancient rice whose plants grow in red, white, black, purple, and yellow. June brings the Okuaka Hydrangea Festival, and June and July the lovely sight of white natsu tsubaki (Japanese stewartia) clusters in Ankokuji Park. Sunflowers are the highlight of August, when the Tanto Sunflower Festival takes place at Tanto Flower Park. In autumn the trees on the surrounding mountains start to change into brilliant shades of red, orange, and yellow, while snow blankets the area with pristine white in winter.
The Tanto area is also home of Ankokuji Temple where the foliage of the dodan-tsutsuji (Enkianthus perultas) shrubs, including one approximately 160 years old, turns into a brilliant hill of color in the autumn. The temple illuminates the hill in the evenings to share is beauty all the more. The temple is also worth a visit during the spring when shrubs’ new foliage comes forth in bright shades of fresh green.
Tanto Tulip Festival
Since 1992, visitors have come to the Tanto Flower Park’s yearly Tanto Tulip Festival every April to admire the hundreds of thousands of tulips planted in the flower beds of Tanto Flower Park.
The tulips are planted in straight lines, allowing for visitors to walk among the flowers and appreciate the colorful scenery.
A portion of these tulips are used to create a unique design every year, including a panda, penguins, and Toyooka’s Oriental White Stork.
*Please check out our events section for updates regarding the yearly Tanto Tulip Festival.