Shitennoji sits in the middle of Osaka, surrounded on every side by the ordinary business of a large city — apartment blocks, a subway line, a road with traffic on it that does not stop.

On the fourteenth of January, water flies across its courtyard.

Since New Year's Day, prayers have been offered in the hall for peace and a good harvest. The fourteenth is when that cycle closes, and closing it involves several hundred young men in loincloths, divided into red and white, packed into the space in front of the building.

Paper talismans are thrown down to them from above. They are charms against misfortune, blessed through two weeks of prayer, and the young men go up after them with both arms — climbing over one another, shouting, disappearing under the pile.

Meanwhile, from the sides, cold water is thrown over the whole mass of them. January water. It lands and rebounds and hangs in the air, and steam comes off two hundred backs at once.

The name of all this is doyadoya, which is roughly the sound of a crowd arriving noisily. Watch for a minute and it seems less like a name than a plain description.

At the gate the same morning, New Year decorations are burning in an open fire — pine, straw rope, last year's charms — going up in smoke while the shouting continues behind.