The Kochi Prefectural Government hosted the “Yosakoi Festival,” one of Japan’s most celebrated festivals, on August 9-12 in the heart of Kochi City, bringing together tourists and dancers, many of them from Taiwan, to enhance international exchanges.

Approximately 18,000 dancers in 207 teams from home and abroad gathered this year for the 66th Yosakoi Festival, showcasing energetic group dance performances combined with a variety of lively music.

(Images: https://kyodonewsprwire.jp/release/201908229905?p=images)

About 70 people in three teams from Taiwan took part in the event, including students at Taichung’s Hungkuang University and employees at Hanshin Arena Shopping Plaza in Kaohsiung. Garbed in colorful costumes, they danced their heart out at outdoor venues and through the streets of the Pacific coast city.

Among the Taiwan contingent were 14 children from Yufeng Elementary School in Jianshih, Hsinchu County. The county sent a delegation to the festival for the seventh straight year. The pupils enthralled the audience with traditional dances of the Atayal, a Taiwanese indigenous people, at a venue set up in front of Kochi Station. They were greeted there by the director of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Osaka and Kochi Governor Masanao Ozaki.

Kochi Prefecture has been deepening its friendship with Hsinchu County by sending a Yosakoi dance team to the Taiwan Lantern Festival and the Hsinchu County Hakka Arts Festival since 2012. In 2017, the two regions signed a memorandum of understanding to promote exchanges between the International Flower Drum Art Festival of Hsinchu County and the Yosakoi Festival.

The number of visitors from Taiwan to Kochi Prefecture has been increasing year after year. Some 18,000 people from Taiwan lodged in the prefecture in 2018, accounting for 28% of the total lodgers there.

In the last fiscal year, Governor Ozaki visited Taiwan in person as a top promoter of the prefecture’s tourism drive. Since February, the Kochi Prefectural Government has been pushing the “Nature & Experience” tourism promotion campaign highlighting natural experiences in Kochi. “We want to continue spreading information on the charms of Kochi to attract still more people from Taiwan,” the governor said.

For details, please visit: http://visitkochijapan.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kt_G60DbcGg