This presentation examines recent transformations of bon odori in contemporary Japan, focusing on developments after the 2011 triple disaster and the COVID-19 pandemic. Rooted in Buddhist and ancestor-veneration practices, bon odori long functioned as a vernacular form with diverse songs and dances. Although suppressed as “uncivilized” during late-19th-century nation-building, it was standardized in the 1930s through the strong involvement of the record industry and its connection to imperial nationalism. After World War II, aside from a few resilient regions, it survived mainly as pseudo-folklore amid rapid urbanization.

After 2011, festival forms inspired by bon odori gained new visibility as vehicles for community bonding and memorial practice. Alternative tendencies emerged: links with anti-nuclear protest movements, connections to festival cultures across Asia, and the incorporation of DJs and live bands. COVID-19 slowed this momentum, yet online streaming expanded information sharing, while prolonged physical separation heightened the desire for embodied sociability. Generational turnover also accelerated as older organizers stepped back, allowing post-2011 “alternative” bon odori to become acceptable.

Within these broader shifts, this presentation focuses on the practice of Kishino Yuichi. Active since the 1980s as a media artist, DJ, musician, and critic, Kishino grew up in eastern Tokyo, where bon odori was abundant, and was an eager participant in his youth. Since the 2010s, drawing on his DJ work in downtown Tokyo, he has experimented with introducing DJs and live performers into local events. Rather than creating new festivals, he emphasizes revitalizing existing but often declining practices by integrating “updated” forms of expression, describing such collaborative work across generations and backgrounds as an “exercise in democracy.”

Through Kishino’s activities, the paper considers how songs from diverse origins—folk, pop, even anime—are performed and bodily shared within these “updated” bon odori, understood as a process of re-vernacularization.