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.