Yamagata Hanagasa Matsuri

The parade began as one event of the Zao summer festival, held in 1963, the 1,250th year since Mount Zao was opened as a sacred mountain, to promote Zao to visitors. It has been held on its own as the Yamagata Hanagasa Matsuri since 1965. Dancing at the 1970 Osaka Expo made it known across Japan, and since 1993 the festival office has been at the Yamagata Chamber of Commerce and Industry. The hanagasa is a sedge hat decorated with flowers made to look like safflowers. The dances fall into four kinds. The standard women's dance, Kunpu Mogamigawa, is meant to suggest the wind crossing the Mogami River and ears of rice swaying; the standard men's dance, Zao Gyoko, the dawn over the Zao mountains. In the kasa-mawashi style from Obanazawa, where hanagasa dancing began, the hat is swung round in big circles, and in the creative dances each group makes up its own. The parade runs from 18:00 to about 21:45 along a straight course through Tokamachi, Honcho and Nanokamachi to the Bunshokan. In 2024 the three evenings added up to about 9,800 dancers in 139 groups. Visitors can join in twice an evening, with no booking and in whatever they are wearing: in the opening ring dance at 18:10 in front of City Hall, near the end of the course, and in the tobiiri section at the back of the parade, which sets off around 20:30.