Two hundred people spend a whole day walking a mountain path.

This is Betsue, a hamlet in the town of Niyodogawa, deep in the ranges of Kochi. For three days from the ninth of February, the deity of Akiba Shrine moves from house to house — first to the small Iwaya Shrine in the rocks, then to the Ichikawa family home, and on the eleventh, back up to its own shrine. On that final day, processions set out from three settlements at once, led by a long-nosed figure in red, and walk three kilometres of mountain track from morning until dusk.

Along the way, the feathers fly. A pole seven metres long and eight kilos in weight, crowned with black plumes, is hurled across ten metres of air from one man to another. He catches it. He must. Then he throws it back. The procession advances in these arcs, over and over, the whole day long.

The shrine is said to have been founded by a Heike fugitive who carried the fire god here from Mount Akiba in distant Enshu, on the other side of Japan. Two hundred and thirty years of this. Held, kept, in a fold of the mountains where snow still sometimes falls on the day itself.

And still, the feathers fly.