Wakasa-kaidō — home of the Tottori Shanshan Matsuri

photo by Asturio Cantabrio · CC BY-SA 4.0

photo by Asturio Cantabrio · CC BY-SA 4.0

In 2014, 1,688 umbrella dancers broke the world record here, 5 minutes.

The Wakasa-kaidō and the streets of the centre are the route of the ‘ichisei kasa-odori’, the collective umbrella dance that closes the Tottori Shanshan Matsuri every year: in 2014, for the fiftieth anniversary, 1,688 people danced together with umbrellas for over five minutes, certified by Guinness World Records as the largest umbrella dance in the world, beating the previous Romanian record of 1,461. The umbrellas used are 1.2 metres long and carry from 30 to 100 bells, whose sound (‘shan shan’) gives the festival its name; the festival was born in 1965 from a merger with a trade festival started in 1961 around the festivals of the Sei and Ōmori shrines.

The main street of central Tottori city, home every summer to the collective dance that closes the city's most important festival of the year.

ℹ️ Public street, always accessible. The 2026 festival (62nd edition) takes place on 13 August (eve) and 14 August (collective dance), in mid-August as every year; the event draws over 200,000 spectators and about 100 groups of dancers.

🚉 Tottori · 9 min walk

Sources: torican.jp · tottori-shanshan.jp · ja.wikipedia.org · guinnessworldrecords.jp

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