Every morning during the festival, volunteers in Katsuura carry some 1,800 hina dolls up the sixty stone steps of Tomisaki Shrine and arrange them, tier upon tier, into a staircase of crimson and gold above the Pacific. Every evening, they carry them all back in. Rain means the dolls stay indoors and photographs stand in their place. This daily labor, repeated for the festival's ten-odd days from late February to March 3, is the quiet engine of the Katsuura Big Hina Matsuri, in which this fishing town of Chiba's outer coast displays roughly 25,000 dolls in shrines, temples, shopfronts, and street corners.

The festival began in 2001 with an adoption: some 7,000 dolls sent as "foster children" from the town of Katsuura in far-off Tokushima — a bond between two towns sharing a name. Hina dolls are seldom discarded in Japan; they carry too much of the households that kept them. Here, retired dolls get a second season by the sea.

The shrine steps are the icon — lit after dusk, worth seeing both by day and by night — but wander: the Kakuoji temple gate, the crossing at Tona, the market street where a bespectacled emperor doll might preside over a fish shop. Katsuura's morning market, one of Japan's oldest, runs the same lanes, and JR Katsuura Station is ten minutes' walk from it all, ninety minutes from Tokyo on the Wakashio express. Count the dolls if you like; the real number to marvel at is the pairs of hands, morning and night.