Tosayamada Yosakoi Festival

The main shopping street (not the highway) that runs perpendicular to the street to Tosayamada Station is closed to car traffic on the day of the Tosayamada Yosakoi Festival. Yosakoi teams dance in parade lines down the street led by large trucks playing music. Costumes are colourful and usually are traditional kimono in appearance but not always. Dancers have wooden clappers (naruko) that they dance with and make noise with to certain part of the songs.

Tosayamada is a small town but despite this the festival was quite large. About 10-15 teams danced through the streets and included people of all ages.

Tosayamada Yosakoi Festival

Tosayamada Yosakoi Festival

Tosayamada Yosakoi Festival

Tosayamada Yosakoi Festival

Tosayamada Yosakoi Festival

Tosayamada Yosakoi Festival

 I took lots of photos in the hopes that it would show the progress of the dance and how some of the moves look. One team was very very professional and I don't believe they were included in the competition because they performed later in the night and were not among the competitors when they announced the winners.

Tosayamada Yosakoi Festival

Tosayamada Yosakoi Festival

The Kochi University of Technology team that we had seen practicing on campus for months before the event were the winners. It was nice to see the university team win since we had sort of met a few people on it before and since they had practiced so hard.

Tosayamada Yosakoi Festival

Tosayamada Yosakoi Festival

 The festival traversed the road and ended up at the baseball diamond where many toy and food stands were set up and a large stage with lighting had been set up. Even at this point in the evening the festival was far from over and all of the teams participated in a large group dance to local songs and then each team had the chance to dance on stage.

Tosayamada Yosakoi Festival

Tosayamada Yosakoi Festival

Tosayamada Yosakoi Festival

The crowds got bigger the later it got and tables got very very packed! The food was the usual Japanese festival food with karage, yakitori and snow cones.

Tosayamada Yosakoi Festival

Once all teams had performed on stage a light show started and after a while Yamada Daiko, a drum band started playing. It was very cool to see the band playing and with the lights and smoke effects as well. They played for a while considering how much effort they were putting in and often switched members playing the drum to give each other a break.

Yamada Daiko at the Tosayamada Yosakoi Festival

Despite it's small size the Tosayamada Yosakoi festival was really really fun to go to and got very crowded at night with so many people watching. The streets were fairly empty but everyone joins for the night activities. In the heat of the day I can't blame them but seeing them on the street was a nice introduction to yosakoi and much better views than the crowded Kochi Yosakoi Festival.