Kochi, Kochi

The naruko clappers rattle in the hand.

Kochi in August. An eve, two main days, an after-festival: for four days the whole city becomes a dance. Close to two hundred teams, nearly twenty thousand dancers. Sound trucks roll their music through nine competition grounds and a scatter of stages across the city.

There are only two rules. Carry the naruko clappers. Work a phrase of the old Yosakoi-bushi into your song. Everything else is open. So each year the costumes change, the choreography changes, the sound changes. The tradition renews itself annually. Few traditions are this free.

It is a young festival — a little over seventy years old — born after the war to lift a struggling Kochi's spirits. It has none of the long lineage of Tokushima's Awa Odori next door. And yet it became the headwater of the Yosakoi-style festivals that now ripple across the whole country.

Southern light, and the heat of the night. Sweat, laughter, the dry clack of the clappers. Yosakoi is a festival the body joins before the mind decides. In Tosa, the summer passes dancing.

This is the herald of the Yosakoi. Kochi—the old province of Tosa—is the home of the Yosakoi festival, where dancers clack handheld wooden naruko clappers as they move through the streets in vast, exuberant teams. And the fireworks announce the opening of its summer, the Tosa night sky bursting open above the Kagami River.

This is the sky Sakamoto Ryoma knew—the restless young samurai from Tosa who helped overturn the old shogunate and dreamed of a modern Japan before he was cut down at thirty-one. The summer sky here is wide and open, almost oceanic, befitting a province that always faced outward toward the Pacific and the wider world beyond it.

After the fireworks, the frenzy of the Yosakoi begins, the clatter of the naruko spilling through every street. There is a quality to Tosa people the rest of Japan recognizes instantly—open, headlong, warm, a little wild. Their summer is cheerful and direct and loud, and the fireworks that begin it carry that same bright unguarded energy up into the southern dark.

Every Sunday morning, the boulevard leading to Kochi Castle becomes a different kind of road.
Both lanes are closed to traffic, and for roughly eight hours, some three to four hundred stalls line both sides of a kilometer-long stretch — vegetables, fruit, hand-rolled sushi, deep-fried sweet potato, knives forged in the local tradition, potted plants, ceramics, and the occasional piece of antique lacquerware.
The market traces its origin to 1690, when the fourth lord of the Tosa domain formalized a system of street markets in his domain law. The location and day of the week have shifted over the centuries, but the market itself has never stopped.
High知 also holds street markets on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays in different parts of the city. The Sunday market is the oldest and largest — the one that draws visitors from outside the prefecture, but whose real purpose is still what it has always been: a place where local people come to buy local things.
Around 17,000 people pass through on a typical Sunday.