Ebisu Drift Matsuri 2026: Every Date & Entry Deadline

A matsuri (祭り — festival) at Ebisu is a festival-style open drift weekend where every course on the mountain is unlocked at once. The part that catches overseas visitors out is the calendar: the application window opens and shuts weeks before anyone turns a wheel.

This page is the dates and deadlines, every figure read off Ebisu’s own pages on 18 August 2026. For what actually happens on the day and how the paperwork reads, our companion piece is the first-timer’s guide to the Ebisu Drift Matsuri.

The three 2026 dates and their windows

Ebisu’s own 2026 event calendar PDF carries the same three sets of dates, but it is headed 「2026年暫定イベント日程」 — provisional 2026 event schedule, dated 2 January — and closes with a line saying the schedule may change. Treat November as firm enough to book leave around, and re-read the official matsuri page before you buy a non-refundable flight.

Reading this in the week of the Summer Matsuri

The summer round on 22–23 August is still open to you, just at the late price. Advance entry closed on Friday 7 August, so the ¥20,000 rate and every pit space have gone. What is left:

• Drive both days: ¥25,000, paid on the day, no pit. You work out of your car.
• Drive Sunday only: ¥20,000 if you pass the gate from 6:00, ¥15,000 from 12:00. Those are gate-entry times, not session times.
• Watch: ¥2,500 adult, ¥1,200 child (age 3 to elementary school), valid across the whole matsuri period.
• Ride passenger: ¥500 insurance, compulsory. Ebisu also asks spectators to stop approaching entrants for rides — most of them are private enthusiasts, not a ride service.

You need a car and a normal driving licence; there is no motorsport licence requirement. Which licence and IDP combination Japan actually accepts from a visitor is worth checking before you count on driving anything.

The full fee ladder

Advance versus on-the-day is not just ¥5,000. It is the difference between having a pit and not having one, because pits are only ever sold through the online system alongside your entry.

Two conditions attached to that ladder. Ebisu Gold Card holders apply through the same online form and pay the pit fee only, but the card has to be valid through matsuri day itself — an expired card blocks the pit booking outright. And the spectator prices are stated as the spring and summer figures; the official page flags that autumn admission may change, so check it again in October. Once you have applied, there are no cancellations or refunds, for the entry or the pit.

The autumn deadline, in your time zone

The window is roughly twelve days wide, and Ebisu states the closing date without stating a cut-off hour — so treat Friday 23 October as the last day in Japan time and do not leave it to the final evening. Pit classes are a fixed number of spaces, not an allocation that grows.

What a traveller has to book by when

Nothing here is an official Ebisu deadline; it is the order the decisions have to happen in, because the entry fee stops being refundable the moment you apply.

The one step that stops overseas entrants

Ebisu publishes an English rulebook and an English application form, so reading the rules is not the problem. Submitting is. The official page links the online entry system and labels it, in its own English text, “Online entry（Japanese）” — and that Japanese system is the only route that can reserve a pit. The page says so twice: pit reservations are accepted online together with the matsuri entry, and applications by fax are not accepted for pits.

The paper alternative works, and asks for things a visitor abroad usually does not have: payment by transfer into a Japanese bank account with the word「マツリ」typed before your name, or cash sent by genkin-kakitome (registered cash mail — a domestic Japan Post service), plus a written address and a contact phone number for the confirmation voucher. The Japanese instructions also ask for a stamped seal on the pledge and state that a thumbprint is not accepted, while the English form’s equivalent box says “Representative signature”. Which applies to an overseas entrant is not stated either way, so we have marked it TBC rather than guess.

Getting there, and when the bus times appear

For the spring round, Ebisu posted a matsuri bus timetable on 2 May for a 9–10 May event — one week ahead. It covered a Fukushima Kotsu route bus and a Showa Taxi shuttle running between Nihonmatsu Station, the circuit and Dake Onsen, at ¥500 one way for adults and ¥250 for children. As of 18 August 2026 no autumn timetable is posted and the site’s news list has not been updated since 2 June, so expect the November version in the week or two before the event. Plan a taxi from Nihonmatsu Station as your fallback and treat the bus as a bonus.

The rest of the practicalities — where the courses are, what the paddock is like, when tsuiso (tandem chase runs) tend to get going — sit in our full Ebisu Circuit guide. And every other round we have verified, with its entry fee and the date its window shuts, is on our calendar of Japanese drift events — because Ebisu is far from the only circuit whose deadline lands a month before the noise starts, and a matsuri is not the only way to get a dorisha (drift car) onto a Japanese track.