A memory of people who fled here from the capital, checked each year against a flame brought from the capital.

Nakamura, now part of Shimanto City, in the far west of Kochi. In the fifteenth century, as the Onin War tore Kyoto apart, a former chief adviser to the emperor, Ichijo Norifusa, withdrew to his family's estates here. His line stayed four generations. They laid the town out on a grid like the one they had left; they named a river Kamogawa and a street Kyomachi. Locals still call this place the little Kyoto of Tosa, and the shrine built in 1862 on the hill where the Ichijo residence once stood is known simply as Ichijoko-san.

Every year from the twenty-second to the twenty-fourth of November the town holds its great festival. A sacred fire is carried from Shimogamo Shrine in Kyoto — the actual Kyoto, six hundred kilometres away — and used to light lanterns that are paraded through the streets. Stalls line the roads. Schools take part. It is, by any measure, the town's biggest event of the autumn.

What is being remembered is not a victory or a founding. It is an arrival: strangers who came from somewhere grander and were, in the end, kept. The town has been saying so for more than a hundred and sixty years, one lantern at a time.