A light will once again be lit this year at the rural stage in Tanto.

— Every year the flowers resemble one another. Yet each year, people are never the same.

In the Tanto region, located on the eastern edge of Toyooka City and surrounded on three sides by mountains, 18 rural kabuki stages—built and preserved by local communities during the Edo period—still remain today. In the mountain villages of the past, where entertainment was scarce, the longing for theater left a quiet imprint on these wooden stage mechanisms, preserved to this day.

The stage work “Tanto Sai Sai” was created in 2022 from the memory of this landscape and has since been performed year after year as a site-specific production sustained by local residents.

It tells the story of Masakichi, a boy who returns to his hometown in Tanto in search of family. Traveling through the stages of folktales preserved in three different districts of Tanto, he encounters various people along the way. Each act alternates between theatrical performance and kagura dance, accompanied by local festival music and traditional performing arts.

Amid cheering crowds, tossed offerings, and bustling shrine grounds filled with stalls and games, we invite you to experience a late-summer Tanto that no theater could ever replicate.