On the fifth of May, across a river, they cut each other's strings.

Ikazaki, in the town of Uchiko, Ehime. On the gravel bed of the Oda River called Toyoaki-gawara, some five hundred great kites go up at once. The two banks — Ikazaki on one side, Tenjin on the other — face off. Each kite carries a small blade called a gagari on its line, and the aim is simple: sever the other side's string before they sever yours. The battle is said to be four hundred years old, and the prefecture lists it as an intangible folk asset.

At noon a single kite the size of a hundred tatami mats is raised — fourteen metres by twelve, a hundred and fifty kilos of paper and bamboo — by a hundred or so local schoolchildren hauling on the rope together.

Before it was a fight, it was a wish. Families wrote a newborn's name on a kite and sent it up, asking that the child grow strong. They still do. These are the shusse-dako, the coming-of-age kites, and the names ride the wind above the river the same afternoon the strings are being cut.

The battle sits on top of that. Everything that falls out of the sky is a footnote to it.