Look up, and your neck will ache. The towering floats of Goshogawara's summer festival rise some twenty-three meters, as tall as a seven-story building. Lit from within, these enormous figure-lanterns move slowly through the night. The form began in the late Meiji and Taisho eras, when wealthy merchants competed to build ever-larger floats, until the spread of electrical wires made the giants impossible and only smaller ones survived. Then, in the 1990s, old design drawings were discovered by chance, and citizens rebuilt the colossal floats by hand, a festival resurrected from the memory held in a blueprint. To shouts of "Yattemare, yattemare," the giants walk through the dark. One of the great summer rites of Aomori.