About Rising Sun Rock Festival

Rising Sun Rock Festival started in 1999 with a straightforward idea: hold a rock festival in Hokkaido that runs all the way through the night until the sun actually comes up. The name isn't metaphor. The first edition drew a few thousand people to the coast near Ishikari, most of them curious whether an all-night outdoor festival in northern Japan was even a practical thing. It was. The format stuck. The festival has come back every summer since, and the core of what it does has barely changed: gates open at dusk, music ends at dawn, and the Hokkaido sky does the rest.

Over the years RSR has become something of a fixed point in the Japanese summer festival calendar, but it's never tried to be the biggest. The site at Tarukawa Wharf keeps the capacity at a level where you can actually move between stages without losing 40 minutes in a crowd. The lineup tends toward artists who have something to say at 03:00 in the morning. Shiina Ringo has headlined before and the crowd at that hour is something you don't forget. Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra can turn a half-asleep field into a dancing one at 01:30. These are not accidents of booking. The programming team thinks specifically about the arc of a night.

The 2026 edition runs August 14 into 15, and August 15 into the morning of August 16, at Tarukawa Wharf, Ishikari Bay New Port. If you want to know more about the story behind this festival and why people keep coming back from every corner of Japan, that's what this site is here for. Through Pass tickets are sold out, but single-day tickets for both nights are on sale now. The August 14 ticket is ¥15,000 and the August 15 ticket is ¥20,000. If you've been before, you already know. If you haven't, this is a reasonable summer to find out.