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.