Tenjin Matsuri has been held at Osaka Tenmangu Shrine every year since the mid-Heian period, making it one of the three great festivals of Japan alongside Kyoto's Gion Matsuri and Tokyo's Kanda Matsuri. It began as a simple rite to appease the spirit of Sugawara no Michizane, the scholar-statesman who was deified as Tenjin, the god of learning, after his death in 903. The shrine was founded in 949, and the festival has grown around it ever since, absorbing the rhythms of the city as Osaka grew into a merchant capital.