Imoni taro soup festival features giant riverside hot pot

The Yomiuri Shimbun

13:01 JST, September 19, 2022

YAMAGATA — Workers, with the help of two shovel cars, mix the ingredients for imoni taro soup in a huge pot constructed next to the Mamigasaki River in Yamagata Prefecture on Sunday, as part of the city’s imoni festival. The event, where the local specialty is cooked and served outdoors, had been held every year from 1989 until 2019. Due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, however, the event served imoni via drive-through in 2020, and it was canceled in 2021. This time, the organizers restricted dining and drinking to a set area as a preventive measure against infection. The soup, containing 3 tons of satoimo taro and 1.2 tons of beef, was cooked in the riverside pot, which measures 6.5 meters in diameter. It took about 4½ hours to prepare some 30,000 servings. People lined up with numbered tickets to get their share, and the soup sold out in about five hours.