Floats of lavish metalwork. At the Takaoka Mikurumayama Festival, on the first of May, seven floats process through a town that has always lived by metal. Takaoka is a city of bronze and lacquer, and it pours every one of those crafts into its floats. The origin, by tradition, is an imperial carriage that Hideyoshi gave to the lord Maeda Toshinaga; the townsfolk took it as a model and competed to pile on decoration. Gold, silver, lacquer, dyed textile—every craft the town possessed, gathered onto a single cart. The wheels groan as the floats advance, slowly, slowly, in no hurry at all: a stately, deliberate pace meant to be watched. There is no wild dancing here. Beautiful things simply pass by, quietly. It is the day, once a year, when a town of artisans shows what it can truly do. UNESCO lists it as intangible cultural heritage.