Hokoku Shrine in Nagahama enshrines Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who made this lakeside town his first castle seat and never entirely left it. That dedication became dangerous when the Tokugawa came to power, and the shrine was destroyed.

The townspeople's response was quietly ingenious. They rebuilt, and placed Ebisu, the god of commerce, at the front. Officially they were merchants praying for good trade. Behind Ebisu, unmentioned, Hideyoshi remained. The arrangement held for the better part of three centuries.

Which is why the shrine's largest festival is not a warlord's memorial but a market god's. On the ninth, tenth and eleventh of January the approach fills with donated lanterns, each bearing a shop's name, and with people buying fukuzasa: bamboo branches hung with charms for the coming year. On the tenth, young women carried in a decorated palanquin process to Nagahama Hachimangu and back, scattering rice cakes along the way.

The chant heard everywhere translates roughly as bring your bamboo, business is good. It is worth knowing, while listening to it, what the shrine spent three hundred years concealing.