Osu Street Performers’ Festival

Sep 17, 2022

Osu Street Performers’ Festival

October brings the Nagoya Festival, a massive parade throughout the city celebrating three great warriors and historical leaders connected to the city: Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. However, this is by no means the only – nor even the most interesting – of the festivals celebrating the city’s great history this month. Another festival that is well worth checking out, though something of a far cry from the great leaders of Japan, is the Osu Street Performers’ Festival in Nagoya’s shopping district of Osu.

Osu Street Performers’ Festival’s History

While today Osu is best known for its Buddhist temple and broad, eclectic collection of unusual clothes stores and boutique restaurants, the history of Osu is something a little bit different.

During the Edo period, ‘yūjo’ (literally ‘women of pleasure’) and brothels were restricted to ‘yūkaku‘, a closed-off area reserved for the sex trade, a red light district as we know it today. In Nagoya, that area was what we now call Osu. As these yūkaku flourished, as well as being home to the city’s sex workers, they grew to include all manner of recreation activities, from fine dining to theaters to shopping and street performance. It is these entertainers from Osu’s 400-year history that are celebrated today.

Osu Street Performers’ Festival, What is it?

While there are many street performers’ festivals in Japan, Osu’s began in 1978 as the brainchild of actor and inventor of Rock Kabuki Tomohiko Hara as an alternative to Nagoya’s main festival, allowing Osu to claim to being the oldest. Today some 350,000 people visit the festival over the weekend to see around 250 street performers, musicians and artists show off their skills, up close and personal at 13 fixed venues in and around the arcade, plus roving performances that move through the arcade.

The highlight of the festival is the ‘oiran’ parade. The oiran were members of the sex industry, however, unlike the regular yūjo these were the highest grade of courtesan, proficient in traditional Japanese arts and able to converse with wit and authority in all manner of subjects. Oiran were a precursor to the now more famous ‘geisha’.  Accordingly, they were well paid (an evening with a one of the top oiran costing somewhere in the region of a shop worker’s monthly salary), and thus ornately dressed.

And it is this dress that makes for such a spectacle as modern-day oiran (who maintain the artistic side of the job but eschew the sexual aspects) are paraded through the Osu arcade seven times during the festival, a remembrance of times gone past.

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Osu Street Performers’ Festival 2022

After three years of enforced absence, 2022 marks a triumphant return for Osu’s Street Performers’ Festival, and as such it is expected to be pretty special.

The festival itself is particularly good fun for all family members, from children to adults, and of course, there is plenty of good food, with many yatai food stalls on top of the great selection of eats that Osu already has on offer.

This year, on the eve of the festival, there will be a ‘zenyassai’ – essentially a pre-party that focuses more on the local residents, though all are welcome. However, things really kick off on the Saturday, when the performers really get going, with a near continual succession of shows as well as the must-see oiran parade. Excitingly, though auditions are still ongoing at the time of publication, there are a number of non-Japanese applicants, so it is great to see this festival with ancient links embracing diversity and reflecting the change in local demographics.

The oiran are not the only parades this year, though. Records from the early 1700’s talk of an elephant being marched from the port to Nagoya Castle, passing through the Osu shopping arcade area. To commemorate this event, two giant papier-mâché pink elephants will be paraded through the arcade on Saturday from around 11:15-12:45 pm (though timings are subject to change).

Furthermore, the local volunteer fire brigade will be giving two ceremonial kiyari demonstrations, in which members in traditional firefighter garb perform acrobatics perilously atop towering ladders. Two shows are planned, both on Sunday: one on the Osu Kannon temple grounds (11:20 am to noon) and one at the maneki-neko plaza (3:40-4:20 pm).

And if all of that were not enough, as the Osu festival this year coincides with the Nagoya City Three Heroes parade which will on Sunday afternoon, between four-thirty, five culminate with several hundred people in samurai battle gear marching through Osu for an ending ceremony on the steps of Osu Kannon. It promises to be pretty dramatic.

For a further taste of what to expect from the Street Performers’ Festival, check out this video from 2019’s extravaganza.

If all of that looks like something that you really want to get involved in, maybe you would like to do more than just attend. The festival are looking for volunteers of all ages, nationalities and Japanese abilities to help out. Should you be interested in getting to know your local community better (not to mention the free bento and beverages and the cracking afterparty) contact Stephen Carter, Osu’s greatest exponent, by email at scarter@hticn.com.

Osu Street Performers’ Festival Details

• When: October 15 and 16, 2022 (with a ‘zenyassai’ held the evening before)
• Website: osu.nagoya/en/me-osudaidochonin.php
• Map Link

Need more reasons to go? Check out our  ‘getting to know you: Osu’ guide.

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Image: flickr.com – “Festival in Osu” by Paul Davidson (CC BY-SA 2.0) -Modified
Image: http://inbound.nagoya-osu.com/en/?page_id=355