Dates: August 12th-15th
Place: Throughout the entire city of Tokushima
City: Tokushima City, Tokushima Prefecture
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Folkdances are performed at this festival to welcome the souls of ancestors in the Bon season, from July to August. ‘It’s a fool who dances and a fool who watches! If both are fools, you might as well have fun dancing!’ are well known words, regardless of their meaning, that is voiced to the set rhythm. Awa dancing is so much more energetic than other styles of Japanese dancing. It’s therefore this festival has some claim to being Japan’s answer to the Rio Carnival. The Awa-Odori is characterised by irregular steps and by the jovial and energetic up-tempo rhythm, separated into two groups of men and women, the dancers’ parade through the city. The dancers dance to music played on drums, gongs used when praying to Buddha and at festivals, three-stringed Japanese musical instruments, and flutes following the basic rule of moving your right arm forward with your right leg then your left arm forward with you left leg in turns to the two-beat rhythm. The daytime attraction is the famous Selected Awa Dance by groups of several dozen dancers called ‘ren’ (and there have been over 800 ren in recent years) giving graceful performances on stage. In various parts of the city dance stages called enbujo are set up where you can watch the dance up close, an Odori Hiroba where even spectators sometimes join in the dancing.
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