Awa Odori - Lord of the Dance

The week before I left the Land of the Rising Sun, I took a little trip with Mike and Ben to Tokushima. For those of you not robbing the Japanese school systems blind as an Assistant Language Teacher, Tokushima is a costal city on the island of Shikoku, or ‘The Four Countries’. The bait: Tokushima plays host to a huge dancing festival. Every year, during the Obon holiday weekend (celebration of the dead, but in a more serious way than Halloween), tourists, locals, and dance enthusiasts converge on Tokushima for a 5 day celebration of the local traditional dance routine. The ‘Awa Dance’, as the dance and festival are both called, is probably the most famous of Japan’s centuries old ceremonial dances. In fact, anyone who has been to Tokushima has undoubtedly seen videos, pictures, or the statues of dancers that seem to line the streets every 20 feet. It’s definitely the city’s claim to fame, unless you’re a big fan of ‘ramen’ (Tokushima’s style is often sought after by noodle aficionados).

Though the festival itself spans 5 days and crazy nights, we actually only went for one of them. That decision was partly financial and partly realizing that the 3 of us going out on consecutive nights in such a milieu could be disastrous on our collective health and possibly on the status of our visas.

The Awa Dance festival turned out to be one of, if not the best, festival that I’ve been to in Japan. The traditional outfits were more colorful than a Gay Pride parade and varied from the yukatas, happis, and jimbes that I’d seen before to things that were entirely new to me. The dances weren’t just contained to the small-football-field-sized bleachered areas made to accommodate the spectators, but spilled out through the entire city to the point that every street corner played host to swarms of energetic festival-goers doing their own renditions of the dance in circular, tribal-style interpretations. All the booze and dancing and shenanigans aside, the best part of the festival for me was the reasonable temperature brought by scheduling the festival at night. Unlike the other big festivals I’d been to where I was almost drowning in seas of my own sweat creeping up in my yukata, I was pleasantly breezed out.

Check out the pictures.

Here are the black and white ones I shot… look at these first, it looks leagues different without the big bright colors.

And these are the ones in color.

Enjoy… and go visit next year!