The floats barely fit through the streets. This is the defining experience of the Sawara Grand Festival: watching a structure ten meters tall, topped with a historical figure several times human scale, navigate a turn between buildings whose eaves it nearly touches on both sides. The floats have been doing this for centuries. Sawara calls itself Koedomachi, Little Edo — a name earned with canal-side merchant houses and sake breweries that have barely changed since the Edo period. The elaborately carved floats, housing mechanical figures that perform acrobatics at the parade's high points, are the physical evidence of this mercantile history. The festival runs twice a year — July for Suwa Shrine, October for Yasaka — both now part of UNESCO's inscription of Japanese float festivals, placing them alongside Kyoto's Gion Matsuri. In Sawara, the crowds are smaller, the streets are narrower, and the floats are just as magnificent. The proximity is the gift.