Kanazawa was, for centuries, the seat of the Maeda clan and the richest domain in feudal Japan, a place measured in koku of rice — a million of them, hyakumangoku, the name that still defines the city's sense of itself. Once a year, in early June, that memory is walked through the streets.

The festival commemorates the day in 1583 when Maeda Toshiie, founder of the Kaga domain, first entered Kanazawa Castle. Its centerpiece is the Hyakumangoku Parade, led by actors playing Toshiie and his wife Omatsu at the head of a long procession of warriors in armor. It begins beneath the great drum gate of Kanazawa Station and moves toward the castle, tracing a route four hundred years old. To watch it is to see a city re-enact its own founding, not as pageant exactly, but as a kind of civic memory kept in motion.

After dark comes the takigi-noh, Noh theater performed by firelight, the chants of the Kaga Hosho school rising against the flames. There are lantern floats on the river, tea ceremonies, a night market. Kanazawa is a city that has held onto its samurai-era culture more completely than almost anywhere else in Japan, and the festival is where that culture steps out of the museums and the preserved districts into the open air.

It falls just before the rains, in the brief bright window of early summer when the castle town is at its most alive.