New Year's Eve on Mt. Haguro is examination day. Since September 24 — one hundred days — two yamabushi priests called matsuhijiri have been confined in ascetic practice on this snowbound mountain in Yamagata, praying the coming year's harvest into being. On December 31, at the Shoreisai, the mountain finds out whether it worked: through a night of competitive rites, the young men of the village below test the two ascetics' accumulated power against each other. A hundred days of discipline, graded in public, in the snow. The rite is an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property, and among the oldest year-end ceremonies in Japan.

The visible drama centers on two colossal straw torches shaped as tsutsugamushi — demon-insects of local legend — which teams of young men rope, topple, and burn to purge the old year's evils. Around this run stranger, older rites: the crow-hop, the dividing of the lands, the ceremonial relighting of fire for the new year, all continuing past midnight in the courtyard of the Sanjin Gosaiden, the great thatched hall where the gods of all three Dewa mountains winter together while Gassan and Yudono lie closed under snow. At three in the afternoon, blessed ropes are thrown to the crowd and fought over; hung at the eaves, they ward a household for the year.

Come prepared: this is a mountaintop in Tohoku on the coldest night of the year, reachable by bus or car from Tsuruoka. As first shrine visits go, it is the opposite of the casual midnight stroll — which is exactly its appeal.