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🏮 Mihara Yassa Sai

三原やっさ祭

Mihara, Hiroshima (Mihara City Center) · Every year in mid August

Summer festivalTraditional performing arts

335 days to go
Rooms around Mihara, Hiroshima fill up while the festival is on.

The Mihara Yassa Festival is held in Mihara, Hiroshima Prefecture, over three days—Friday, Saturday, and Sunday—including the second Sunday of August each year. One of the leading summer festivals of the Chugoku region, it draws about 400,000 visitors. Organized mainly by the Mihara Yassa Festival Executive Committee and others, it bustles with spectators from within and outside the city. The yassa odori dance at the center of the festival traces its origins to 1567, when the Sengoku warlord Kobayakawa Takakage built a sea castle in the bay at Mihara and people celebrated. It is said to have begun when people, drunk on celebratory sake, started dancing to hayashi music of shamisen, drums, and flute, and it took its name from the hayashi refrain "yassa, yassa." With no fixed form, it took root among the masses as an "ashi no odori" (foot dance) in which each person dances freely. Today, along with the free-spirited yassa odori performed to lively hayashi music of shamisen, gongs, drums, flutes, and yotsudake clappers, the Yassa Daiko, created in 1995, and the Yassa Hanabi Festa are also highlights. People from children to adults can take part widely, and it is loved as a summer tradition of Mihara.