The last full day of our trip involved a quick trip to Tokushima on the Shikoku Island for Awa Odori, which is a traditional dance festival held annually from August 12 to 15. It is part of the Obon festival, which honors the spirits of ancestors. It is supposed to be the largest dance festival in Japan, which attracts more than a million visitors each year.
We debated for the longest time whether we should go, partially our logistics only allowed us to go on the first day of the festival, and on the last full day of our trip, which would mean an end to our trip that’s a million times more complex than just staying in Osaka, while trying to find transportation and accommodation with many others in Japan at the same time, since during Obon, many Japanese who work in larger cities often go home to dance during Awa Odori. Add to that was I needed to leave Japan half a day earlier than the rest of the crew for a half day errand run in Hong Kong.
Thanks to very detailed and well appreciated help from @TokushimaCook , we were able to get much of the logistics sorted.
We took a bus from the Nankai station and arrived at lunch time at the Tokushima Bus/ Train Station. It was the first day of the festival and its pretty quiet, relatively, because I was expecting throngs of people for the festival. I guess everyone showed up at night and everything peaked towards the end of the festival, rather than the beginning. But then again there were a million buses arriving from Osaka, and other parts of the country all throughout the day. It looked like most of the crowds were local Japanese and we were one of the few foreigners in town for Awa Odori.
Even though I said the station was relatively quiet the restaurants around the station were still quite crowded. So we grabbed ramen from 堂の浦, on a quieter side street near the station, beating the lunch crowd.
The fish skin was fried to delicate perfection in a very good shio ramen.
Refreshing drinks to cool us down.
Because we arrived on the earlier side, the festival hadn’t begun yet after lunch, so we just strolled around in the mall near the station. We got tickets to attend a dance performance in a performing art center mid-afternoon, as well as seating tickets in one of the four streetside stand for the first performance of the evening.
Performance sponsored by the free range local chicken company. Would love to give that chicken a try. One can see which performing groups, known as ‘ren’, are on the schedule for the performance on each day.
Groups of dancers performed choreographed routines accompanied by traditional instruments like the shamisen, taiko drums, and flutes. Dancers wore traditional attire, including happi and yukata. The choreograph, lighting and music was a lot more elaborate in the performing art center than in the street, since on the street, you can pretty much only move forward along the street, whereas on the stage, they had more freedom. These groups often practice all throughout the year, with the best of them all trying to outdo one another and grab the top performing group for the festival and have the bragging rights to performing as the winner on the last day of the festival in the street, broadcasted live on TV.
After the performance, we started heading to our stand. The streets surrounding the performing street area were starting to fill up with street food vendor ready for the crowds and performers heading to the staging area. Seeing the size of the crowds, we quickly gave up any illusion of getting food from restaurants near the parade spectator stands and grabbed some quick bites from the stand to eat during the performance.
We settled into our seating area. And the performances promptly began.
