The culture part of the program featured a festival from each of the six prefectures in the Tohoku Region: Aomori, Akita, Yamagata, Miyagi, Iwate, and Fukushima Prefectures.

They are all annual summer festivals. There's an emphasis on this region because it was where the March 2011 tsunami and earthquake hit Japan the hardest. The Japanese government also wants to call this the "Recovery Olympics."