Kochi Yosakoi Festival

Kochi Yosakoi Festival began in 1954 as a Chamber of Commerce initiative to revive the postwar city, built around the newly created Yosakoi Naruko Dance and its wooden clapper, the naruko, once used to scare sparrows from rice fields. Under loose rules allowing any musical style incorporating the Yosakoi Bushi melody, thousands of dancers in creatively varied teams now parade through Kochi each August.

In 1954, still recovering from the devastation of the Second World War, business leaders in Kochi organized through the local Chamber of Commerce sought a way to lift local morale and stimulate the region's struggling postwar economy, and their solution was a new citywide dance festival built around a specially created piece of choreography called the Yosakoi Naruko Dance, itself adapted from an older folk melody known as Yosakoi Bushi.