Katsuyama Sagicho Festival

Katsuyama has been burning the new year since the Ogasawara lords arrived three hundred years ago. The rite belongs to koshogatsu, the little new year, and was long held on the fourteenth day of the first lunar month; it now takes the last full weekend of February, which is when this corner of Fukui is still under snow. Twelve yagura go up in the streets of the town centre, and on top of each one adults in red silk nagajuban, children among them, drum and clown their way through a quick shamisen, flute and gong accompaniment. Nowhere else in Japan does it this way, which is why Fukui files the festival under kisai — the odd ones.

The first drum sounds at 13:00 on the Saturday and the town does not really stop until Sunday night. Red paper streamers hang the length of the shopping streets, and between them stand the tsukurimono: tableaux built out of household things, each a visual pun on the year just gone. Walking between the twelve stages is the whole of it — every district plays a different piece, the drumming is designed to be laughed at rather than admired, and you are expected to stand close.

On the Sunday evening each district carries its sacred object down to Benten-gawara, the riverbank below the town known for its cherry trees in April, and builds it into a pyre. At 19:30 fire is taken at Shinmei Shrine and carried down by torch, and at 20:00 a signal rocket puts every pyre alight at once. The dondo-yaki sends the gods back with the smoke and asks for a good harvest and a year without fires, and the line of flames along the snow-lit riverbed is what people come for. Okuetsu calls this the festival that brings spring.

It costs nothing, indoors or out. Katsuyama Station is ten minutes' walk from the yagura and about an hour from Fukui on the Echizen Railway, which makes the festival a straightforward day out now that Fukui is on the Hokuriku Shinkansen. Dress for standing still outside after dark in February, with snow underfoot: the drumming goes on regardless of weather, and the riverbank has no shelter at all.