Dai-chan the Bonbassador's men's kimono class:
“Gentlemen, let's wear yukata.”

“I would like to try wearing yukata, but how do I start?” “Where is the right place to buy one?” For most men, that is the first real wall in the way of ever putting on a kimono or a yukata.

Dai-chan, who calls himself the “Bonbassador®” — an ambassador for bon-odori dancing — goes to more than a hundred bon-odori dances a year and spends over a hundred days a year in yukata. To him, a yukata is what a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms are to everyone else. He has put together a talk about what makes yukata different from Western clothes, and more enjoyable, here in Arimatsu, the town of shibori.

He owns some 120 yukata in all, around 25 of them shibori. On the day he plans to speak in an Arimatsu shibori yukata he came across at this year’s Arimatsu Shibori Festival.

If you are curious but have never managed the first step, or you already own a yukata and would like to know a little more — come along. Let this be the start of your men's yukata debut next summer.

Speaker: Tomohiko Sato (Dai-chan, the ®Bonbassador). A freelance PR writer and a devoted bon-odori dancer, he takes in more than a hundred dances a year — mostly around Tokyo, but also Gujo Odori in Gifu and events overseas. Under the name he coined for himself, ®Bonbassador, he plans and produces bon-odori events and choreographs dances, working to spread the pleasure of bon-odori at home and abroad. He appears widely in the media, including TBS’s “Matsuko’s Unknown World”, NHK’s “Min’yo Damashii”, and the opening ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. His book “Tokyo Bon Odori Tengoku” (Yama-Kei Publishers) is on sale now. In 2025 he opened Haraiso, a base for events in a roughly hundred-year-old townhouse in Gujo Hachiman, Gifu.