A Hokkaido University student saw the Yosakoi festival in Kōchi in 1991 and brought the format north, adding the Sōran Bushi, a Hokkaido herring-fishermen's work song. Thirty years later some 30,000 dancers in around 270 teams compete across Sapporo over five days, each team with its own choreography, costume and truck-mounted sound system, all of them carrying naruko clappers.
The executive committee publishes attendance per edition; we have not collected a dated one.
The form has since spread to several hundred cities, which makes this one of very few modern Japanese festivals to have become a national genre — and it is the reason Kōchi's original and Sapporo's offshoot are both on the partner calendar.
PlanningAn early-June window; a competitive format invented in 1992 and now copied nationwide.
Dates
Season
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.