Try to name a flower that blooms in Japan in January. The list is short, and on this coast it has one entry.

The Echizen shoreline is thick with Japanese daffodils, slope after slope of them opening in the snow, which earned them an older name: setchu-ka, the flower in the snow. The scent carries on the wind off a winter Sea of Japan, which is not a gentle sea.

Ikuracho, in the Fukui City stretch of the coast, is held to be where cultivation began. The slopes here fall so steeply toward the water that the daffodil fields are terraced like rice, and the resulting landscape, fields and hamlets together, is designated an Important Cultural Landscape.

The festival rotates between three communities along the shore, and its dates move. They move because the bloom moves. Recent summers have run warm enough to delay the flowers, and in some years the festival now waits until deep January before it opens.

It is a festival that waits for the flowers rather than the other way around.