The story
Kuroishi Yosare in Kuroishi
Kuroishi Yosare is an August 15-16 dance festival in Aomori Prefecture, rooted in a five-to-six-century-old courtship song later promoted as civic revitalization in the 1780s. Recognized in 1982 as one of Japan's three major nagashi-style dance parades, it brings 2,000 to 3,000 dancers in straw hats and yukata processing along the historic Nakamachi Komise Street through three distinct dance styles.
Local tradition in the small castle town of Kuroishi, in Aomori Prefecture, traces the origins of the Yosare dance back some five to six hundred years to a courtship song exchanged between men and women, a folk custom that long predates the festival's more formalized modern structure.