Today, July 7th, is Tanabata — Japan's Star Festival.

Every year around this time, you start seeing bamboo branches decorated with colorful ornaments in shopping malls, community centers, and schools all over Japan. The other day, on my way to do some shopping, I stopped by Soka Matsubara and found Tanabata decorations swaying in the wind there, too.

The Tanabata of my childhood

When I was small, this season always meant craft time at kindergarten and elementary school: we folded paper streamers and chain rings from origami, wrote wishes on narrow strips of paper called tanzaku, and hung them all on bamboo branches.

There was even a school-wide "Tanabata assembly" — the whole school gathered in the gym around a bamboo tree covered in everyone's wishes, and we sang the Tanabata song together. I remember it only hazily now, but fondly.

Here is the story every Japanese child knows: Orihime the weaver princess (the star Vega) and Hikoboshi the cowherd (Altair) were separated on opposite banks of the Milky Way, allowed to meet only once a year — on the night of July 7th. And if it rains that night, even that one chance is washed away.

July in Japan is the middle of the rainy season. As a child, I'd feel relieved on a clear Tanabata night — "good, they got to meet" — and genuinely sorry for them when it rained. One chance a year, and it rains!

Every decoration has a meaning

It turns out the decorations I made so carelessly as a child each carry a wish of their own:

• Fukinagashi (streamers) — Orihime's weaving threads; a wish for skill in weaving and sewing
• Amikazari (net ornament) — a fishing net; for good catches, good harvests, and scooping up happiness
• Orizuru (paper cranes) — for family safety and long life; some families fold one for each year of the eldest member's age
• Kinchaku (drawstring purse) — for good fortune with money, and the spirit of thrift
• Kuzukago (wastebasket) — filled with the paper scraps left over from making the other decorations, to teach tidiness and not wasting things

A decorative wastebasket, hung on the bamboo to teach children not to waste paper — that struck me as wonderfully, quintessentially Japanese. If I'd known about the money purse as a child, I would have mass-produced them.

The five colors of the tanzaku strips — blue, red, yellow, white, and black — come from the ancient Chinese theory of the five elements. The children's Tanabata song even mentions "five-colored tanzaku"; the lyrics had real meaning all along.

Where Tanabata comes from

For a festival so familiar, I realized I knew nothing about its origins, so I looked it up.

Tanabata began as a Chinese star legend — the cowherd and the weaver girl — together with a Chinese court ritual in which people prayed to the stars for skill in weaving, calligraphy, and other arts. When these came to Japan, they merged with an ancient native rite called tanabata (棚機), a purification ceremony praying for a good harvest. That blend became the festival we know today.

People have been writing their wishes to the stars for many hundreds of years.

Wishes in the town of departures

Soka Matsubara, where I found these decorations, is known as the place the haiku poet Matsuo Basho reached on the very first day of his journey in Oku no Hosomichi ("The Narrow Road to the Deep North," 1689). It's a beautiful pine-lined stretch of the old Nikko Highway, now designated a National Place of Scenic Beauty.

There's a spot here where visitors hang small wooden plaques called tabidachi tegata — "departure tags" — each written with a wish or a hope for a new journey.

Seeing the Tanabata strips and the wooden travel plaques swaying side by side in the same wind, I thought: an Edo-period poet and we people of today are doing exactly the same thing. Writing down a wish, hanging it in the wind, and praying.

Somen noodles on Tanabata!? (I had no idea)

While reading up on the festival, I learned something else for the first time: Tanabata has a traditional festival food, and it's somen — thin white wheat noodles served cold. Twenty-six years as a homemaker, and I never knew.

The custom goes back surprisingly far, to a twisted rope-shaped Chinese confection called sakubei. Eating it on July 7th was said to protect you from illness for a year, and over the centuries the custom shifted to somen, made from the same wheat.

There's also a lovelier theory: that the thin white noodles represent the Milky Way, or Orihime's weaving threads. I much prefer that version.

Now that I know, we're having somen tonight. With plenty of condiments — I'm firmly in that camp.

Three generations, three wishes

My mother attends a day-care service for seniors, and they hold a Tanabata event every year, complete with wishes on tanzaku.

This year, the wish written by my mother's friend — who is ten years her senior, in her nineties — was so honest and charming that I burst out laughing:

They say we return to childhood as we grow old. There was something so utterly guileless about that wish that it moved me more than it made me laugh.

As for the contents of my own wish — money for retirement, my mother's care, my grown children. The worries never stop coming, and honestly, I'm worn out by them these days.

But when I think of that tanzaku written by a woman in her nineties, my shoulders relax a little. I hope that someday I, too, can write nothing more than "may I eat lots of delicious things."

Thirty years from now, may my Tanabata wish be "plenty of cheesecake, please." And may all of your wishes come true.