Most festivals celebrated in Japan have a tradition stretching back centuries, and some date back a thousand years. Then again, Japanese will look for any pretext to have a good time, so some festivals have been invented quite recently. Unlike the traditional festivals, they have no historical or religious basis.

One of these is the Hamamatsu Yosakoi Ganko Matsuri, held this past weekend in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture. This year’s festival was just the sixth. Hamamatsu is known as the home of motorcycles and musical instruments—Yamaha and Kawai are headquartered here—and was also the site of Tokugawa Ieyasu’s worst military defeat before he became the first Tokugawa shogun in 1603. (The Tokugawa shogunate lasted until 1867.)

Ganko is a word in the local dialect that translates into standard Japanese as hijo ni (extremely) or sugoi (a word overused in everyday speech by younger people in the same way that “awesome” is overused by younger people in the United States, with much the same meaning). So, you could say that the name Ganko Matsuri means Super Festival, and that’s exactly what the organizers suggest in Japanese.

There’s only one festival rule, and it’s very simple—anyone may participate as long as they have a musical instrument, no matter how rudimentary, and they dance. Until last year, the rule was that participants had to have naruko, or wooden clappers. That was amended this year to include any musical instruments, traditional or modern, including the clappers. Other than that, people are free to do what they like, including design their own costumes and create their own dance, whether it be old-fashioned bon odori or hip-hop. And they do.

People participate in teams, and this year about 3,000 people from all over the country showed up to perform in groups ranging from 15 to 100 people. Some in the group may specialize in singing or chanting, waving banners, or playing the musical instruments or clappers. In addition to parading down the city’s streets—in which the residents also take part—the teams get individual time on stage to be judged for awards. They have all of five minutes and 30 seconds to get on stage, line up, perform, and leave.

The Organizing Committee has a high-minded list of festival objectives, which include boosting the city and its industries, promoting interaction with people from other parts of the country, and encouraging citizen participation in local activities, but it’s really just a cover for “Have a good time.” I don’t know how it went down this year, but here’s a glimpse of what it looked like last year: