Floats race up the temple approach. At the Narita Gion Festival in July, ten floats and stalls parade before Naritasan Shinshoji, the great temple, hauled up and down the steep slopes of its approach. The festival is more than three centuries old, a prayer to the deity Fudo Myoo for good harvests and the granting of wishes—a temple rite that is also, fully, a town's festival. Its climax is the soubiki, when all ten floats gather before the main hall and charge up the slope at once, the festival music rising to its peak as the crowd roars. Sweat flies. In the full heat of a midsummer afternoon the floats are dragged up the steep approach, a sheer contest of the haulers' strength, and watching it your own muscles tense in sympathy. Three fierce days in the town before the temple gate—the summer face of Naritasan.