There is a shrine in Komaki, in the flat farming country north of Nagoya, dedicated to a god of harvests and to a woman made divine for raising her children alone and helping her father open up the land.

On the fifteenth of March, a wooden object is carried from a neighbouring shrine to this one on a portable altar, and the object is unmistakably a phallus.

Visitors sometimes arrive expecting a joke. It is not one, though it is not solemn either. What is being asked for here is the oldest request there is: that the fields produce, that things grow, that life continue past the people currently living it. In much of the world that request has been dressed in metaphor. In Komaki it has not been.

The object is carved new each year from Kiso cypress. There is a set day in early March for the first cut of the axe, and a set day in February for choosing by lot the five women who walk in the procession carrying smaller carvings.

Men in their unlucky years shoulder the altar. The route is short, and lined the whole way with people, a good number of whom have flown a long distance to stand there.

Everyone is smiling. That is what you notice. Not smirking: smiling, the way people do at a wedding.

Afterward rice cakes are thrown into the crowd, and spring in Owari has formally begun.