Venue: Shizuoka, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan When: Nov 1st - Nov 4th 2018 ,  10:00am - 5:00pm

From Thursday 1st November 2018 to Sunday 4th, the annual Daidogei World Cup will be held in Shizuoka City. At dozens of stages all around the city, you'll be able to watch street performers of every kind: clowns, acrobats, jugglers, aerialists and more, both Japanese and international. I've been a couple of times in the past, and it's always a tremendously fun event. Shizuoka is a pretty compact place so it's easy to walk between the stages, and part of the fun is walking round a corner and finding a new act doing their thing.

Other than at the Premium Stage in Sunpu Castle Park, all the shows are free to watch, though the right thing to do is to put some money in the hat that gets passed round afterwards. I also think that the appeal of street performance is the closeness between performer and audience, which is lost in a big venue. As well as the shows, there are food stands and a beer garden in the park, face painting booths, and clowns and stilt-walkers roaming the streets. I'm already looking forward to it!
 

Getting there

There are over thirty stages around the city, mostly in Sunpu Park and the main downtown core, around ten or fifteen minutes' walk north of JR Shizuoka station.