TOKUSHIMA

Awa Odori Festival Guide: Everything You Need to Know About Tokushima’s Greatest Dance Celebration

Every August, the streets of Tokushima City transform into the largest outdoor dance party in Japan. For four nights straight — traditionally August 12 to 15, with some venues starting as early as August 11 — more than one million visitors pack the illuminated city streets to watch, and often join, the Awa Odori: a centuries-old collective dance that is equal parts street festival, musical spectacle, and joyful communal ritual. If you’ve ever wondered what makes a Japanese matsuri feel truly alive, Awa Odori is the answer. The festival is officially ranked among Japan’s three greatest performing arts festivals, alongside […]

More

Things to Do in Tokushima: Iya Valley, Awa Odori, and Naruto Whirlpools

Tokushima Prefecture sits in the northeast corner of Shikoku, and it packs more drama into a compact area than almost anywhere else in Japan. Within its borders you will find the Iya Valley — one of the country’s most inaccessible and atmospheric mountain gorges — the thundering Naruto Whirlpools in the strait between Tokushima and Awaji Island, the four-century-old Awa Odori dance festival, and a stretch of the Pacific coast wild enough that it still sustains wild sea turtles. If you are wondering what to do in Tokushima, prepare to be surprised by how much depth this often-overlooked prefecture contains. […]

More

Naruto Whirlpools Guide: Best Boat Tours, Viewing Times, and Getting There

The Naruto Whirlpools are one of nature’s most mesmerising spectacles — vast spinning vortices of seawater up to 20 metres in diameter that form in the Naruto Strait between Tokushima Prefecture and Awaji Island every six hours as tidal currents collide. They are the third-largest natural whirlpools in the world (after Norway’s Saltstraumen and Canada’s Old Sow), and unlike those northern counterparts they can be viewed up close from a glass-bottomed boat or from a glass-floored walkway suspended 45 metres above the roiling water. If you have ever wanted to stand directly above a swirling ocean vortex and feel the […]

More