Awa Dance Festival

[1] Groups of choreographed dancers and musicians known as ren (連) dance through the streets, typically accompanied by the shamisen lute, taiko drums, shinobue flute and the kane bell.

Others picked up commonly available musical instruments and began to play a simple, rhythmic song, to which the revelers invented lyrics.

[4] However, according to local historian Miyoshi Shoichiro, this story first appeared in a Mainichi Shimbun newspaper article in 1908 and is unsupported by any concrete evidence.

[attribution needed] In 1685 revelers were prohibited from dancing after midnight and dancers were not allowed to wear any head or face coverings,[7] suggesting that there were some serious public order concerns.

[8] The festival was revitalised at the start of the Shōwa period (1926) when Tokushima Prefectural authorities first coined the name "Awa Odori" and promoted it as the region's leading tourist attraction.

The origins of the melodic part have been traced to Kumamoto, Kyūshū, but the Awa version came from Ibaraki Prefecture, from where it spread back down to Nagoya and Kansai.

The restrictive kimono allows only the smallest of steps forward but a crisp kick behind, and the hand gestures are more restrained and graceful, reaching up towards the sky.

This usually involves one brightly dressed, acrobatic dancer, darting backwards and forwards, turning cartwheels and somersaults, with freestyle choreography.

In some versions, other male dancers crouch down forming a sinuous line representing the string, and a man at the other end mimes controlling the kite.

It is the second largest Awa Dance Festival in Japan, with an average of 188 groups composed of 12,000 dancers, attracting 1.2 million visitors.

[12] In the 1994 Studio Ghibli film Heisei Tanuki Gassen Ponpoko (released as Pom Poko in English-speaking countries), during the scene where the film's tanuki use their transformation magic to put on a parade of yokai, part of their display includes a procession of tiny Awa dancers.