The Howl & Moon: Awa Odori Festival

"It's a fool who dances and a fool who watches!

If both are fools, you might as well have fun dancing!"

These are the lyrics to a song for the Awa Odori. It's Japan's biggest, most famous folk dance festival. It takes place every year in Tokushima City, usually in August, and draws hundreds of thousands of people to party in the streets for 4 days with a spectacle of dances to rouse and welcome the ancestors as well as your drinking spirits.

The story goes that when the feudal lord Hachisuka Iemasa opened Tokushima's new castle in 1587, he offered sake to the townspeople who became so inebriated that they danced with an unsteady gait, which gave rise to the dance's incarnation of slightly awkward moves. Through the centuries, the same dance is performed by men, women, and children alike who practice for 6 months to get the legs and arms to move just so.

The music is performed with shamisens, gongs, flutes, and taiko drums. This is no tame lyrical piece, the dance is energetic and increases in tempo. The kids start out with calls and chants followed by the women doing a more elegant syncopated dance while stepping on the fronts of their wooden slippers, almost like ballerinas en pointe. (Their hats are out of this world, like splayed fans encasing their heads.) The men then come out all explosive energy, doing more freestyle moves within the dance vocabulary, punctuated with shouts and claps and lots of crowd intimidation. The show we saw, the musicians played so fast and furious that one woman performing a duet fell to her knees and then had to be carried out on her partners back!

Being that we missed the big city celebration due to lack of available hotels, which was both a disappointment and blessing as Hopper surely would not have enjoyed throngs of shouting people in the streets, we were excited to see a smaller celebration here in Kamiyama at the Shosanji Temple, number 11 on the 88-temple pilgrimage route on the island.

The 20 minute drive up the mountain through fog and leaping frogs ended with a most breathtaking stroll up the candle-lit path to the temple. We joined a couple hundred people who were excitedly chatting and kids running amok, excited by the promise of fireworks and shaved sugar ice.

The first dance is community dance, so Hopper and I joined in with him clinging to me for dear life. One older lady was just gettin' down, not caring what the steps were, so much so that her friends were trying to pull her out of the circle for fear of embarrassment. But she wasn't having it. Just shakin' it, she was.

After a small lull we heard the drums start to beat from behind the temple. Then the call from the kids, who were so cute in their costumes, confidently chanting, slowly making their way to the dance area behind a man with lanterns. And the whole thing unfolded in variations and brought tears to my eyes. I wanted it to go on and on. So much joy and expression which is what makes this festival so unique.

The fireworks began shortly thereafter to which Hopper was none so pleased. But they burst just overhead as they're launched from further down the mountain, so never have I ever experienced them so close and engulfing. It was spectacular.

Again and again, we have felt so lucky and honored to be part of this organization, this community and its open arms, and the rich culture of this island.

PS. We were still working out the camera so a lot of the photos are blurry.

the guys in blue with red belts are firemen, they were on hand in case the fireworks set the temple alight, but I'm fairly certain their main concern was beer