The swords are taro stems with pumpkin hand-guards. The topknots are palm bark; the formal robes are feed sacks. On the second Sunday of September, in the farming district of Asano on the southern edge of Takamatsu, men in extravagant face paint shoulder a mikoshi built of vegetables and household goods and spend two kilometers hyogeru-ing — a Sanuki dialect word meaning to clown, to play the fool — from the community hall to a reservoir called Shin-ike. This is the Hyoge Matsuri, and beneath the comedy it is a festival in honor of civil engineering.

Kagawa is Japan's driest region and its most pond-covered: thousands of irrigation reservoirs stitch the Sanuki plain. Around 1670, an engineer named Yanobe Heiroku built Shin-ike and delivered water to chronically parched Asano — and the community deified him. The procession that mocks samurai pomp with taro-stem swords is, at its heart, a thanksgiving to the man who made the rice possible; the fifty swords are still carved fresh each year by residents, and the full set of homemade regalia is a prefectural cultural property, the parade itself a municipal one.

The finale is the most direct act of gratitude in Japanese festival culture: the mikoshi, bearers and all, plunges into the pond itself. Thirty minutes by car or bus from central Takamatsu, mid-afternoon, free, and increasingly beloved by photographers — though it remains, proudly, a village affair. Come for the face paint; stay for the theology of infrastructure.