On March 10 each year, a portable shrine weighing a full ton descends 202 stone steps. This is the Hote Matsuri of Shiogama Jinja, the ancient first shrine of the old Mutsu province, counted among Japan's three great "rough mikoshi" festivals — though the roughness is not what you might expect. Sixteen bearers in white, moving in silence, carry the octagonal shrine down the steep front approach known as the Men's Slope, one deliberate step at a time. The crowd holds its breath. What makes it "rough" is not violence but jeopardy: one slip on those stairs would be catastrophe, and everyone watching knows it.

The festival began as a fire-prevention rite after a great blaze in 1682, and has run in its present form since 1733 — a spring-summoning ceremony for a port town still cold in early March. Through the day, the mikoshi tours Shiogama with a procession of five hundred attendants and children in court dress; at seven in the evening it returns and climbs the 202 steps back up. The tension comes twice, descending and ascending, and the ascent by lantern light may be the finer sight.

Shiogama is fifteen minutes from Sendai on the Senseki Line, a few minutes' walk from Hon-Shiogama Station — and it happens to hold one of the highest concentrations of sushi restaurants in Japan, fed by its tuna port. A ton of god coming down a staircase, then maguro for dinner: early spring in Tohoku has worse itineraries.