On an average year in Koenji, a neighborhood on the west side of Tokyo known for its bohemian vibes, late August sees dozens of dance troupes flood the streets as they pound taiko drums, wave their arms and parade down the town’s main concourses in a two-day frenzy.
Based on a centuries-old summer festival from Tokushima Prefecture, this matsuri is known as the Koenji Awa Odori, and the commotion draws about 1 million visitors, making it one of the capital’s largest summer festivals.
On an average year, that is. Of course, the years between 2020 and 2022 were anything but average. Starting in 2020, the Koenji Awa Odori was canceled for three summers in a row because of the COVID-19 pandemic — the first full-scale cancellations in the festival’s history, which dates back to 1957. Now, the first Koenji Awa Odori since 2019 is set to take place this weekend.
Tengu-ren dances at an Awa odori event in Kagurazaka ahead of the Koenji Awa Odori festival, which takes place on the last weekend of August.
| MATT SCHLEY
To learn about the effect of that four-year gap and to see how preparations for the 2023 edition were progressing, I spoke to several people involved in the festival in the weeks leading up to the main event.
Inheriting a festival
Takeyuki Tomizawa, executive director of the Tokyo Koenji Awa Odori Promotion Association, which oversees the festival, was born into the Koenji Awa Odori tradition: His parents were shop owners on Koenji’s Pal shopping street, which initially brought the summer festival to Koenji as a way to boost summertime sales.
“In those days, only people from the shopping street were allowed to dance, and children of shop owners were forced to participate whether they wanted to or not — I hated it!” says Tomizawa with a laugh.
Awa was the name of a province on the eastern edge of Shikoku (present-day Tokushima Prefecture), and “odori” is the Japanese word for “dance.” The Awa odori ren (dance troupes) typically dance in a two-step rhythm called zomeki. Women wear large, pointed straw hats and dance on their tiptoes in wooden clogs with their arms waving in the air, while men take a crouched position, sometimes wielding uchiwa (fans) or chōchin (lanterns). They’re followed by the hayashi, or instrument section, which features thundering taiko, gongs, shamisen and flutes.
Giant “taiko” drums are a big part of the Awa odori (Awa dance) festival in Koenji.
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For the inaugural version of the festival in 1957 (in which Tomizawa’s mother danced) Koenji shop owners chose Tokushima’s Awa odori not because of any particular ties to the region, but because unlike other summer festivals, which require bulky mikoshi (portable shrines) or giant nebuta (floats), the Awa odori could be danced with ease down Koenji’s narrow streets.
“I think the close proximity between the dancers and the audience is still one of the biggest factors in the appeal of the Koenji Awa Odori,” Tomizawa says. “Both groups feed off each other’s energy, and spectators get fully enveloped in a shower of sound.”
Because no one in Koenji had actual Awa odori experience, the initial years of the festival didn’t look much like the Tokushima original, but it slowly came to resemble the real thing as the years went on. The celebration also expanded in scope, with several other Koenji shopping streets joining in on the action.
As the festival grew, so did management challenges, like dealing with the large amount of garbage left in the event’s wake. Tomizawa, now a recent university graduate working at his parents’ shop (and having recovered from his childhood hate of the festival), was drawn into festival management thanks to owning a certain item.
“Before PCs were common, I had an early word processor, so shop owners would come ask me to make flyers and other documents,” he says. “That got me more involved with festival operations.”
By the early 2000s, the festival was beset with organizational issues, says Tomizawa: the ren were linked up in a haphazard way with no one thinking about the festival’s overall budget. Festival leaders decided to turn the Tokyo Koenji Awa Odori Promotion Association into a dedicated nonprofit to handle such issues, headquartering the new NPO on the same shopping street where he had grown up. Tomizawa, having long recovered from his childhood hate of the festival, became executive director in 2011, the year of the Great East Japan Earthquake, when the festival’s start time was pushed up by two hours in the face of power-saving measures. That (plus torrential rains which forced the cancellation of one of the festival’s two days in 2001) was the closest thing to a full-scale stop in the 60-plus-year history of the festival — until 2020.
Expect the streets of Tokyo’s Koenji neighborhood to be busy and full of spirit when the Koenji Awa Odori takes place on Aug. 26 and 27.
| MATT SCHLEY
By March of that year, as COVID-19 began to spread throughout Japan, it was clear that the Awa Odori had to be canceled.
“It couldn’t be helped,” Tomizawa says with a shrug when asked how he felt about the decision. “I wanted it to go forward, but there are times when these things are simply not possible, like during natural disasters. There’s no point in thinking too hard in those situations.”
His main concern was in pulling off the cancellation as cleanly as possible, talking to parties involved like the police, sponsors and individual ren captains before making the general announcement.
“Everyone agreed it was the right choice,” Tomizawa says.
Shortly thereafter the Promotion Association established guidelines for ren that wanted to continue to practice, including limits on the number of people, masking, temperature tests and so on.
Meanwhile, the pandemic stretched on. Both 2021, then 2022, were deemed a no-go — even as smaller Awa odori events began to reemerge throughout Tokyo. In that sense, Tomizawa says, Koenji Awa Odori was a victim of its own success.
“If we held our festival, we would run the risk of too many people showing up,” he says. “But those other festivals gave many Koenji ren the chance to perform and keep up their motivation, so they were great.”
For Tomizawa, the biggest challenge during the pandemic years was in maintaining the organization behind the festival. Subsidies from the government helped keep things afloat financially and led to innovative events such as livestreams that combined Awa odori dancing with projection mapping and a scaled-down, auditorium-based festival in fall 2022. But other ties were harder to maintain: The hundreds of volunteers that help keep the festival running smoothly have typically been led by a team of university students — but years of remote learning caused that team to all but dissipate.
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“We started rebuilding the group starting last year, but college students still haven’t returned to the fold, so we recruited local high school students instead,” Tomizawa says. “It’s been four years, so some of them have never actually seen the festival in person.”
Still, Tomizawa says the time off hasn’t been all bad.
“When you’re preparing year after year, you don’t have a lot of time to think,” he says. “But in these past four years, I’ve had more time to consider how we do things and discover inefficiencies in our system. For that reason, the pandemic wasn’t a total minus in my book.”
Taking back the summer
Of the more than 150 ren that typically participate in the Koenji Awa Odori, Miyuhiyoko-ren may be the cutest. The “hiyoko” — literally “chick” — in the name refers to the group’s main characteristic: children.
“Back in the day, the festival was limited to dancers who were really skilled,” says Yoshimi Saijo, who has been in the Miyuhiyoko-ren since its founding in 1986 when she was 4 years old. “The parents at my nursery school, including my father, decided to form a ren so that kids could perform, too.”
The Miyuhiyoko-ren practice session I visited in late July involved young children trying their best to mimic the Awa odori’s iconic zomeki two-step while getting used to the loud sounds of the instruments played by the adults in the group.
The young dancers of Miyuhiyoko-ren practice their steps ahead of the Koenji Awa Odori.
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“This is good enough,” says ren captain Hayato Kimura with a grin as the children half-dance, half-amble their way down the practice hall. “There’s value in simply participating.”
Because Miyuhiyoko-ren, unlike other ren groups, appears only in the Koenji festival, and because its membership is centered around children, the group was forced to put a full stop to its activities after the announcement of the 2020 cancellation.
“It couldn’t be helped,” says Kimura, echoing Tomizawa’s view on the issue.
“When we heard the news, the only thing to do was accept it,” adds vice-captain Tomoki Kumagai, who joined the group 16 years ago to participate alongside his daughter, who’s still in the group 19 years after joining.
Miyuhiyoko-ren captain Hayato Kimura holds up his troupe’s shirt. Despite its members’ young age, he notes there is a lot of value in participating.
| MATT SCHLEY
But as the pandemic stretched into a multiyear affair, things became more precarious for Miyuhiyoko-ren. Four years is a long time in the life of a child, and while the group’s activities were paused, nearly all its young members drifted away. Recruiting new members for the 2023 festival involved a combination of social media appeals and good old word-of-mouth networking.
“It took a lot of effort, but we now have 20 or so children participating this year,” Kimura says. “Normally, we only take newcomers up to 6 years old, but this year, because of that four-year gap, we expanded the range up to sixth-graders. We want to help children take back their summer.”
Another crisis point was when Miyuhiyoko-ren’s founder, who led the group since 1986, decided to call it quits this year.
“It was a combination of getting older, the pandemic and the children leaving the group,” Kimura explains.
With that decision, the group was initially set to disband this February — but with 2023 looking like the year the festival would finally return, the members got together for a discussion and decided to keep going with Kimura as captain.
“At first, our plan was to skip this year and come back in 2024,” he says. “But we decided it was important to show the community that Miyuhiyoko-ren is still around. It would be great if the children who left see us dance this year and decide to return to the group.”
Fighting through the pandemic
On the other end of the ren spectrum is Suzaku-ren, a troupe founded in 2003 by captain Mashiko Inoue. I visited Suzaku-ren in late July as they prepared to perform at a Bon odori festival in Fujisawa, Kanagawa Prefecture, one of the many events at which this group has been hired to perform in its two-decade history.
Inoue, who was previously a member of another Koenji ren, founded Suzaku-ren because she wanted to blend two styles — men dancing using chōchin and women dancing the men’s dance using uchiwa — something that was frowned on in her previous group.
Suzaku-ren captain Mashiko Inoue says her troupe managed to keep up its steps by performing at events like weddings.
| MATT SCHLEY
“I was told it couldn’t be done, that the styles were too different to mix, but I didn’t agree,” Inoue says.
The group is based in Koenji but has participants from all over — even people who have moved to places like Fukuoka and Osaka but still make the trip to Koenji once a month or so to join in.
Despite the pandemic and the multiple Koenji Awa Odori cancellations, Suzaku-ren somehow managed to keep practicing and performing throughout the pandemic years. But, Inoue explains, that was largely thanks to a stroke of luck.
“In 2020, two of our members were getting married, and we were scheduled to perform at their wedding,” she says. “They managed to keep the wedding from being canceled, and so we ended up practicing a bit later than other groups. That meant we were one of the only ren in fighting form, so we ended up being invited to a lot of other events.”
Those events were largely livestreams with few or no audience members, which involved changes to the group’s dance style.
“We were on stages instead of on the street, so we had to rethink things a bit, changing the choreography and so on,” Inoue says.
The group also had to deal with a temporary drop in membership because many of its members were essential workers, including nurses and teachers. During that time the group performed with 25 or so dancers, down from its usual number of about 60. Most of those members have now finally been able to return to practice and performances, says Inoue.
Paradoxically, she adds, many of the members who joined the group just before the pandemic hit now have three or four years of experience but have never actually performed in the Koenji festival.
“I have to stop and think, ‘Wait, they’ve never done this before!’” says Inoue. “Plus, even those of us with a lot of experience haven’t done it in years and have forgotten a lot, so it’s a bit nerve-wracking.”
Dancers from Suzaku-ren take part in a practice session. The troupe, founded in 2003, uses a unique combination of lanterns and fans in its dance.
| MATT SCHLEY
Nerves aside, Inoue is palpably excited to hit the streets of Koenji for the first time in four years.
“I look at Koenji in a totally different way than other performances,” she says. “For us, it’s the real deal — the main event. At other venues, we always try to do our best, of course, but in Koenji, we really perform from the heart.”
Tomizawa echoes that sentiment.
“Compared to when I was a kid, people are far more fired up about the festival,” he says. “Back then, it was just a kind of hobby, but now there are people who devote their lives to it.”
“Devoted” describes founding Miyuhiyoko-ren member Saijo, who even flew back to Tokyo every summer to take part in the festival when she lived in Los Angeles during her university years.
“In Koenji, we can’t really say the year is complete unless we have the Awa odori,” says Saijo. “During the pandemic, my greatest feeling was, ‘I want to dance again soon.’”
Inoue agrees.
“In 2019, as we came down the shopping street, I noticed there wasn’t a face in the audience that wasn’t smiling,” Inoue says. “I’ve been doing this for about 35 years, but that really struck me. I remember thinking clearly, ‘Wow, I’m really doing something nice.’ I can’t wait to experience that again.”