Once a year, the oldest playhouse in Japan is used for what it was built for.

Kotohira, in Kagawa, at the foot of the long stone stairway up to the Konpira shrine. The old Kanamaru-za was raised in 1835 and is now a designated Important Cultural Property. Its revolving stage and the trapdoor lift beneath the runway are turned and hoisted by men below the floor. There is no electricity, no machinery. You sit on a raised tatami box in the smell of old timber and see a play the way an Edo audience saw it.

Kabuki returned to the building in 1985. Since then, for a little over two weeks each April, actors from the Shochiku company come to perform. On the day before opening they walk in procession up the main approach — the o-neri — and the town is at its brightest all year.

The theatre can be visited on any ordinary day. But when the plays are on, it becomes something else.

Not a preserved building; a working one. Spring in Kotohira is where you can tell the difference.