The name of Fukuoka's great spring festival comes from a Dutch word. Dontaku derives from Zondag — Sunday, a day off — a trace left by the port city's long history of foreign trade. But the festival beneath the borrowed name is far older: it grows from the Hakata Matsubayashi, a folk celebration some eight hundred and fifty years old. Old tradition, foreign word, fused into a single thing.

It falls over two days at the start of May, in the middle of Japan's Golden Week holiday, and it draws more than two million people, which makes it one of the largest spring festivals in the country. The centerpiece is the parade along Meiji-dori, where the dontaku troupes dance past in costumes of their own devising and decorated floats — the hana-jidosha — roll slowly through, throwing color across the street.

The instrument of the festival is the shamoji, the flat wooden rice paddle. People clap them together as they dance, and the sound — thousands of wooden paddles struck in loose unison — is the sound of Dontaku itself.

What gives the festival its particular warmth is how open it is. Companies join, schools join, and in Fukuoka it has become a small rite of spring for new employees to dance in their first Dontaku. The whole city, more or less, takes to the streets. The paddles clatter, and Fukuoka's early summer begins.