Bon Odori, communal dancing performed during Obon to welcome and entertain the spirits of the returning dead, takes strikingly different regional forms across Japan, and the best known, Tokushima's Awa Odori, transforms the entire city for four nights in mid-August into a continuous street performance, with organised dance troupes called ren, some hereditary and centuries old, parading through closed-off streets to a driving rhythm of shamisen, drums and flute while hundreds of thousands of visitors watch or join in, making it one of the largest dance festivals anywhere in the world and, for many Japanese people today, the most visible and recognisable image of Obon itself.
Smaller-scale Bon Odori, typically a simple circular dance performed around a central raised platform, the yagura, to recorded or live folk music, remains a standard community event at shrines, temples and neighbourhood associations across the whole of Japan and within Japanese diaspora communities overseas, including in Hawaii and the continental United States, where Buddhist temples serving Japanese-American communities have kept Obon dance festivals running continuously for many decades as one of the clearest surviving threads of Japanese religious and cultural practice in the diaspora.