Every year, for three nights in early September, the sloping lanes of Yatsuo are given over to sound and slow movement. Dancers in woven hats — men and women in matching yukata — move through lamplight to the ache of a kokyuu fiddle and shamisen, performing the ancient Etchu Owara folk song as they go. The festival traces its origins to 1702, when the townspeople of Yatsuo celebrated reclaiming their town charter with three days of music and procession. Over three centuries, it became something else: a prayer against typhoon winds, a harvest rite, an art form. Eleven neighborhood groups take turns through the night, and some 200,000 visitors arrive each year — yet the streets of Yatsuo somehow remain, against all expectation, quiet.