On June 24 each year, in the rice country behind Shima's famous coastline, one of Japan's three great rice-planting festivals unfolds at Izawanomiya — a detached shrine of Ise Jingu, which is to say, about as close to the center of Shinto as a village festival can stand. The rite, formally the Isobe no Omita, is a national Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property, and its origin legend runs back some two thousand years, to the princess Yamatohime watching a crane drop an ear of rice here and resolving that this ground should grow the grain offered to Amaterasu herself.

The day moves between violence and grace. Late morning, a tall sacred bamboo crowned with a great fan is planted in the flooded paddy, and young men plunge into the mud to topple it and fight for its pieces — the Taketori rite, all spray and shouting, the fragments carried home as talismans by fishing families. Then the water stills, and women in white with red sashes step into the same field, planting seedlings in unhurried lines to the sound of flutes, drums, and the scrape of the sasara. An afternoon procession, the odorikomi, winds back toward the torii.

Kaminogo Station on the Kintetsu Shima Line is three minutes' walk from the shrine, an easy detour from Ise or Kashikojima. Shima usually means the sea — ama divers, pearl rafts, saw-toothed bays. One day a year, the rice paddy outranks them all.