In mid-March, on the weekend nearest the 14th and 15th, the canal town of Omihachiman on Lake Biwa's eastern shore burns its own artworks. The Sagicho festival of Himure Hachimangu shrine centers on floats crowned with a "dashi" — a sculpture of the year's zodiac animal built entirely from food: black soybeans, azuki, dried squid, kombu, katsuobushi, each town guild spending two to three months on its design. The floats parade to shouts of "choyare, choyare," clash against one another in the streets, and then, on the festival's final night, are set alight and given whole to the gods. The extravagance is the point: only something genuinely precious — food, time, craft — makes a worthy offering.

The rite came here from Azuchi, the vanished castle town of Oda Nobunaga just up the lakeshore; the warlord is said to have danced in the Sagicho himself, flamboyantly costumed. When Azuchi fell, Hachiman's merchant town inherited the flame, and has kept it for four centuries — the festival is now a nationally selected intangible folk cultural property, sometimes billed as "the strangest festival under heaven."

Omihachiman is thirty-five minutes from Kyoto on the JR Biwako Line, and the setting is half the reward: the Hachimanbori canal lined with white-plastered storehouses, Mount Hachiman's ropeway above, the lake beyond. Come for the weekend if you can — the parades by day, and the fires, reflected in the old canal, by night.