On the fifteenth of January, in the tuna port of Misaki at the tip of the Miura Peninsula, one of the smallest festivals in Japan may also be one of its most quietly astonishing. Chakkirako, inscribed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage, uses no instruments. The music is the unaccompanied singing of the town's women — mothers, grandmothers — and the dancers are young girls, moving with fans and slender bamboo wands from the shrine to the street corners to the tatami rooms of harborside restaurants, blessing the new year as they go. It has been this way for perhaps two hundred and fifty years: an art kept alive entirely by women, passed down voice to voice in a working fishing town little more than an hour from Yokohama. There is no spectacle to speak of — no fire, no floats, no crowd of thousands — only clear voices in cold air and the precise, unhurried gestures of children who are being handed something old. The harbor wind off Sagami Bay is bitter in January. The songs, somehow, are warm.