Photo= A scene from "Koisuru Fortune Cookie Maimai Kyoto Version"

A video featuring Kyoto residents dancing to the hit song "Koisuru Fortune Cookie," or fall in love fortune cookie, sung by the popular idol group AKB48, was produced by the planners of the walking tour "Maimai Kyoto" and uploaded to the video-sharing website "YouTube." A total of 230 people, including not only tour participants, but also shopkeepers, students and others, appear in the video which was filmed at 47 locations around the city. The trend of making dance videos featuring this song is spreading nationwide, so the planners want to connect with the boom and acquire more Kyoto fans.

"Maimai" means "hanging around" in Kyoto dialect, and it features tours guided by local residents. Various people, such as master carpenters of Kyoto's traditional townhouses, homemakers, shopkeepers at long-established kimono fabric shops and others, guide the courses while making the most of their special fields.

The video was planned by an executive committee consisting of Kyoto Youth Hostel Association and others. Knowing that local government staff and corporate employees around the country had danced to the song "Koisuru Fortune Cookie" to promote their organizations, they decided to make their own video, explaining, "The video will convey the purpose of the friendly tours."

For filming locations, they selected places visited during the actual tours, including the banks of the Kamo River, the entertainment area Miyagawa-cho, Sanjokai shopping district and others. Led by the guides, the "Yuru-Kyara" shopping district mascot, civil servants and other people happily danced to the light music matched with AKB48's choreography.

It was released on December 23, 2013 and has had more than 40,000 views. Takayuki Ikura, executive committee member, said, "We hope this will be an opportunity for people to widely get to know aspects of life-sized Kyoto."

Koisuru Fortune Cookie
It was released as AKB48's 32nd single last August and a million sales were recorded on its release day. Rino Sashihara, who won first place in the AKB general election held just prior to that, plays the center position. It conveys the feelings of a girl who is forward-looking despite her having a premonition of a broken heart. A fortune cookie is a crisp cookie wrapped around a slip of paper with a "fortune" written on it. It's also known as an "Omikuji cookie," or fortune paper cookie.