The blessing arrives as a splash of boiling water, flung at you by a masked god with his bare hand. In the Toyama valley — a deep fold of mountains at Nagano's southern tip, part of Iida city but a world of its own — a dozen small shrines take turns through early and mid-December performing the Shimotsuki Matsuri, an all-night cycle of cauldron rites designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property. A great kettle boils at the center of each sanctuary; to kagura songs, the celebrants raise offerings of hot water to summon and entertain the gods of all Japan, here at the year's darkest turning, when the sun itself is believed to weaken and need reviving.

Deep in the night, the masked gods appear, and the climax is the yukiri: a tengu-masked dancer plunges his bare hands into the seething cauldron and flings boiling water over the crowd. To be splashed is the point — the scalding drops burn away the year's impurities and confer a new soul for the year ahead. Shrieks and laughter ricochet around the wooden hall until dawn.

The festival is often cited as one of the inspirations behind Spirited Away — a bathhouse where the eight million gods come to be refreshed turns out to be less invention than reportage. Reaching Toyama-go takes commitment (roughly an hour's mountain drive from central Iida), and December nights here are bitter. Go anyway. Few places in Japan let you be personally scalded by a god.