Akita, Akita

Behind each float hangs a placard mocking the times. In the port town of Tsuchizaki in Akita, summer brings a procession of bold floats topped with warrior dolls. But the festival's wit lies in the panel mounted at the back of each one, where a freshly written satirical verse comments on the year's politics and social mood. The tradition dates to the mid-Edo period, when this thriving stop on the northern shipping route saw its merchants and dockworkers vie in displays of strength. On the night of the 21st, lanterns are lit and the music quickens. To cries of "Joyasa, joyasa," the floats return to the shrine in a procession that brings the festival's excitement to its peak. Bravado and humor together, the temperament of a port town turned into a festival. A UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage.

When night comes, the rice ripens in the air.

Akita in early August. Forty-six paper lanterns hang from a single bamboo pole, arranged to suggest ears of rice and bales of grain. The largest poles rise some twelve meters and weigh fifty kilograms. A bearer balances all of it on his palm, then his forehead, then his shoulder, then the small of his back. He does not let it fall. He does not let it tip. When the wind comes, he holds.

The festival began as a midsummer rite to drive off sleep and ill fortune before the harvest. Somewhere along the way, a prayer for good rice became a discipline of the hands. For more than two hundred and sixty years, the people of this city have passed the balance down.

Kanto is counted among the three great festivals of the Tohoku region. It is not the ecstasy of Aomori's Nebuta, nor the ornament of Sendai's Tanabata. What you find here is a quieter tension. A single pole bends and rights itself against the dark, and the crowd stops breathing with it.

The lit rice sways overhead. Faces below are lit from beneath, all of them bright. In the rice country, the summer ripens in the sky.

Some fireworks announce an ending. These announce a beginning. On the eve of the Kanto Festival—one of the three great festivals of the Tohoku north—the sky over Akita fills with fire, and the city understands that summer has truly arrived.

The Kanto itself is a thing of strange beauty: long bamboo poles hung with dozens of paper lanterns, balanced by performers on palm and forehead and hip, swaying like heavy stalks of rice ready for harvest. The festival is, at bottom, a prayer for a good crop in a region that has grown Japan's finest rice for centuries. The fireworks on the river the night before are the overture—the sign that tomorrow the lanterns will rise.

The summers are short this far north, and that shortness gives them an edge of preciousness you do not feel in the long humid south. People gather on the banks of the Omono River knowing the season will not last. Each night counts. The fire climbs over the water, the crowd looks up, and somewhere in the dark the great lantern-poles wait for their turn, and the whole brief northern summer seems to gather itself into a single bright held breath.