Yosakoi: Tradition at High Volume

     Yosakoi is a Tosa-born dance festival that's been clacking, dancing, and sweating profusely in the streets of Kochi since 1954. More than 200 groups of 15-150 people dressed in exquisite costumes follow huge, decorated trucks loaded down with speakers on a course that takes them all through downtown Kochi. The rules for your dance are only that you a)use naruko (traditional wooden hand clackers, originally used to scare birds away from fields) and b)utilize at least part of the traditional Tosa "Yosakoi Naruko Dancing" song (usually as loud as your truck o' speakers will go and often severely remixed). This festival has grown in popularity and has now spread to many other parts of Japan, and now even brings Yosakoi teams from all over Japan to Kochi City, to boogie in the birthplace of the festival. The teams range from obaachan (grannies) in kimonos keeping the traditional flavor alive, to young hip hop dance teams, complete with dudes in afros and blackface (!?) getting down to tunes from saturday night fever.
     While sitting, watching the endless flow of dance teams thump past with my gaijin compatriots (namely Mark, Gary, and Nina), one guy at the end of a huge group turned, smiled right at me, and began spastically waving us on. “Is he serious?” I thought, realizing he was very serious as he danced over, thrust naruko into my hands and ushered the four of us into the back of the troop. Off we went, attempting to pick up the steps as we went along. We must have been a sight, four gaijin at the back of a 100 dancer team (not to mention the only ones not in costume), stumbling the dance half a beat late and sweatin’ it up with the best of ‘em. Luckily, the dance was more traditional and didn’t involve any wild running jump steps or sudden changes, and we did end up dancing through almost the entire length of Obiyamachi (the main covered street), so by about the 4th time through the dance or so, we actually had the dance pretty much together.
     I cannot say that I was quite prepared for the immediate relevance of my comment when Gary, not 20 minutes before we were drawn into the fray, noted how cool it would be to dance in Yosakoi, and I simply concurred, “Yea. That’d be awesome.”
     It was.