The sound is the thing you remember: twenty squads of fifteen men in brilliant costume, singing an ancient refrain — iyaa-tohoyo-tohoyaa — while clashing and weaving six-foot oak staves in rhythm, over and over, as the procession inches through the grounds of Kashima Jingu. This is the Saitosai, the great spring festival of one of eastern Japan's oldest and most important shrines, held every March 9 with a documented history reaching back to 1204 and roots presumed far older. It is a nationally selected intangible folk cultural property.

The structure of the festival is as interesting as its spectacle. Each year, a divination rite selects two parishioner districts as the coming year's hosts; the chosen villages then spend an entire year preparing — enshrining a spirit of the deity, appointing a boy "supreme commander," rehearsing the stave-song. To be chosen reorders a community's whole year, and communities here have taken that turn for eight centuries. The deity of Kashima governs departures and beginnings — the old phrase kashima-dachi, "to set out from Kashima," survives in Japanese to this day — which makes March, the threshold of Japan's new fiscal and school year, exactly the right season for this festival of setting forth.

Note the schedule: the shrine rite falls on the 9th, but in years when that is a weekday, the stave-parade moves to the following Saturday. Kashima is about two hours from Tokyo via the Kashima Line or highway bus; the shrine's cedar forest and its resident deer repay the trip on their own.