Katori, Chiba

Along the river, the Edo period remains.

Sawara grew rich on the water trade of the Tone River, a town of merchant houses, and along both banks of the little Ono River the black plank walls and tiled roofs still stand—the streetscape of the age when boats carried the cargo, left more or less as it was. It is sometimes called a little Edo, and the name fits.

A sake brewery still works here, on the same spot for more than two centuries, a survivor of the days when this town shipped its rice wine downriver to the capital. What makes Sawara unusual among preserved towns is that it was never frozen: people live in these houses, run shops from them, go about their business. It is a living place that happens to look two hundred years old.

Take one of the small boats and you see the town from the water, looking up: the white walls of the storehouses, the willows, the low bridges passing overhead. The boat moves slowly, at the pace the river allows, and that unhurried speed turns out to be exactly the right one for looking at Sawara.

The floats barely fit through the streets. This is the defining experience of the Sawara Grand Festival: watching a structure ten meters tall, topped with a historical figure several times human scale, navigate a turn between buildings whose eaves it nearly touches on both sides. The floats have been doing this for centuries.

Sawara calls itself Koedomachi, Little Edo — a name earned with canal-side merchant houses and sake breweries that have barely changed since the Edo period. The elaborately carved floats, housing mechanical figures that perform acrobatics at the parade's high points, are the physical evidence of this mercantile history.

The festival runs twice a year — July for Suwa Shrine, October for Yasaka — both now part of UNESCO's inscription of Japanese float festivals, placing them alongside Kyoto's Gion Matsuri. In Sawara, the crowds are smaller, the streets are narrower, and the floats are just as magnificent. The proximity is the gift.