Around 14,000 dancers in some 150 groups move along a kilometre and a half of Yamagata's main street over three evenings, each carrying a straw hat decorated with artificial safflowers — the crop Yamagata grew for dye and which made the domain's merchants rich.
The whole festival is danced to one song, the Hanagasa Ondo, with regional variations in the step.
No attendance figure is collected in this pass.
The dates are fixed at 5–7 August and deliberately dovetail with Aomori's Nebuta, Akita's Kantō and Sendai's Tanabata, so that the four can be seen in one week. That coordination is itself a piece of regional tourism policy from the 1960s, and it works: the Tōhoku summer circuit is one of the busiest domestic travel weeks of the Japanese year.
PlanningFixed on 5–7 August, completing the Tōhoku summer circuit with Nebuta, Kantō and Tanabata.
Dates
computed from the rule
Computed from the recurrence rule we record for this entry, not copied from a listing. A date marked ~ comes from a calendar conversion and the observance may fall a day or two either side.