Yamagata, Yamagata

A pot six meters across.

On the dry riverbed of the Mamigasaki in Yamagata, every September, they cook what they call the greatest imoni in Japan: three tons of taro and a ton of beef tipped into an enormous iron cauldron, the ingredients loaded by machine, the fire fed with split wood. A crane stirs it, because no ladle could.

Imoni itself is nothing grand. It is the ordinary autumn ritual of the region—families and coworkers gathering on a riverbank, building a fire, sharing a pot of taro stew. Inland Yamagata makes it with soy sauce and beef, and will argue the point with anyone who makes it otherwise. The festival is simply that same homely act, scaled past reason: some thirty thousand servings cooked and gone by the end of a single day.

It is not a spectacle in the usual sense. No floats, no fireworks. People come to a riverbed to boil potatoes. But thirty thousand of them come, to boil potatoes together, and watching the steam rise off that absurd and serious pot, you begin to understand what autumn means here.

Ten thousand dancers, each carrying a broad hat decorated with red safflower blossoms. The Hanagasa Festival moves through central Yamagata over three evenings in August, and the sound — Yassho, Makasho, repeated by thousands of voices in rhythm with the dance — becomes, by the second evening, the sound of the city itself.

The hanagasa hat takes its flower from benibana, the safflower cultivated in the Yamagata basin for centuries and used to produce the red dye that once made this region wealthy. The festival was created in the twentieth century, which gives it a deliberately joyful character. During certain portions of the parade, anyone can join the line of dancers. The steps are simple enough to learn by watching.

On the last night, when the procession has been going for hours and the crowd has loosened, and the dancers are still calling out with the same energy as the first hour — that is when you understand why a city would choose to do this every August. The answer is not complicated. It is the dancing.

Each September, the riverbanks of Yamagata fill with smoke. Groups of friends, colleagues, and families set up gas burners and large pots along the Mamigasaki River and make imoni — a stew of taro root, beef, konnyaku, and green onion in a soy-based broth that is specific to the Yamagata style. The imoni-kai, the taro gathering, is not a festival in the formal sense; it is a seasonal ritual that most Yamagata residents participate in as naturally as they participate in cherry blossom viewing.

The first Sunday of September brings a more organized version to Yamagata City: a pot six meters in diameter, capable of feeding thirty thousand people, operated by a team with a crane. The spectacle is considerable. But the authentic imoni-kai experience is smaller and less organized — a group of people by a river, making a specific food that defines the beginning of autumn in this prefecture.

Visitors are welcome at both the festival and the informal gatherings. The stew is not complicated; its significance is contextual. Understanding that this is how Yamagata marks the end of summer changes the experience of eating it, which is perhaps the truest thing that can be said about regional food.

This is the summer of the flower hats. The Hanagasa Festival fills the streets of Yamagata with dancers holding straw hats adorned with safflowers—the hanagasa that gives the festival its name—as they move to the rhythmic chant of "Yassho, makasho." It is one of the defining celebrations of the Tohoku summer, and around it the fireworks rise.

The shells open over the banks of the Mamigasaki River, at the foot of the sacred Mount Zao, the dancers' chant still echoing in the warm air. Yamagata is the safflower city—in the Edo period, the cultivation of this red-orange flower, used to make precious dye and cosmetics, brought the region its wealth, carried south to Kyoto along the old trade routes.

Flowers run all through it. The flowered hats in the dancers' hands, the safflower history beneath the city's prosperity, and now the fireworks—hanabi, written with the characters for "flower" and "fire," the flowers of fire blooming above the river. In Yamagata the summer is colored by flowers of every kind, woven from petals and dye and light, the whole season flowering at once in the northern dark.

A university opens up a town. In Yamagata City, an art festival is held once every two years, organized by the Tohoku University of Art and Design. Because a university creates it, education and expression are continuous; students, faculty, and invited artists make the festival together. The fields it covers are wide, art, craft, design, music, performance, talks, the fences between genres set low. The venues are not only the university; works extend to the city's cultural facilities and into the streets. Tohoku has long been regarded as far from the center, but to be far also means a distinctive culture can grow, the quiet contemplation of a deep-snow land. This festival carries a will to express in Tohoku, and from Tohoku. Contemplation over glamour, depth over bustle.