Yamagata Hanagasa Matsuri — luxury itineraries and concierge.

Yamagata Hanagasa Matsuri, from an operator's side.

Hanagasa takes Yamagata's main avenue on the evenings of 5, 6 and 7 August. The dancers carry hanagasa — woven straw hats trimmed with artificial safflower, the crop the region built its wealth on — and move in long disciplined columns to a chant that does not vary all night. It sits at the end of the Tohoku festival week, which works in an agent's favour: by the time it starts, the visitors who came for Nebuta and Kanto are travelling home, and Yamagata is the one city of the six where a late enquiry has a genuine chance of a good room.

• The choreography is uniform and the columns are long, so the difference between a striking evening and a monotonous one is the viewing position and the length of time clients are asked to stand.
• Yamagata is off the main Shinkansen trunk and reached by a branch line, which makes the journey the part of the file most likely to go wrong for anyone treating it as a simple hop from Sendai.
• The festival is barely known to inbound visitors, which keeps it comparatively easy to book and also means clients will not have heard of it — the case for including it has to be made by the agent, not by the name.

Basing decides the file.

Yamagata city near the avenue is straightforward and the walk back is short. For a high-end file the more interesting answer is Ginzan Onsen or the Zao ryokan within a private transfer — better rooms, a proper onsen evening on the nights either side, and a drive home after the dancing that is scenic rather than tedious.

When to start.

Six to nine months, which is the shortest of the Tohoku summer festivals and worth knowing. It falls at the tail of the week and draws far fewer inbound visitors than its neighbours, so a file that has already lost Aomori can often still be rescued here.