Nikko is usually encountered through its excess. The Toshogu shrine — built to enshrine the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu — is among the most ornate architectural complexes in Japan, every surface carved and gilded to a degree that makes excess look like devotion. Visitors come prepared for this and are not disappointed. The Yayoi Festival offers a different register. Held in April at Futarasan Shrine — the older, quieter complex nearby — it culminates with a procession of a thousand people in samurai armor moving through the great cedar avenue. The cedars are enormous, several hundred years old, and the armor-clad figures beneath them are partly absorbed by the scale. This is the spring festival that the mountain requires, not the one that tourism has amplified. The drums are measured. The crowd that lines the cedar avenue is mostly Japanese, mostly quiet, watching something that has been happening here every April for centuries — a ceremony addressed to the mountain, not to them.