The largest festival in southern Kyushu takes over the tram-line avenue of Tenmonkan, Kagoshima's downtown, for two days at the start of November. Its name is Ohara, and its principle is simple: anyone can dance.

The music is local to the bone — the Ohara-bushi, the Kagoshima Hanya-bushi, the Shibuya Ondo — folk songs that most people here have known since childhood. To them, more than twenty thousand dancers move through the streets in the soodori, the great communal dance. They come in troupes, each in its own bright costume, and together they fill nearly a kilometer and a half of avenue until the whole downtown is a single moving current of color.

One of the festival's signatures is the ogojo-daiko, the drumming of the women — ogojo being the Kagoshima word for a woman. The Satsuma ogojo strike their drums into the November night with a force that carries down the whole street.

The festival began in 1949, in the years after the war, built by citizens intent on reviving their damaged city. It has been growing ever since, and in recent years the dancers have included more and more visitors from overseas. That is the thing to understand about Ohara: it is not something you watch from the side. It is something you are invited into. The autumn belongs to everyone who steps into the line.