Tsuruga's festival begins on the evening of September 2nd and runs to the 4th, though that is only the part outsiders see. Subsidiary rites continue at Kehi Jingu for days afterward, which is why locals call it the long festival.

The figures riding the floats are warlords of the Warring States period, life-sized and armoured. What sets them apart is that the masks and armour are not props. They are real Noh masks and real armour, dressed onto the mannequins each year by the neighbourhoods that own them.

The floats themselves are not stored assembled. They are built again from raw, unlacquered timber for every festival, then decorated, then taken apart. At the top of each one stands a pine. The pine is not ornament but requirement, and the whole arrangement preserves a form that goes back to the late Muromachi period, when Tsuruga was a port on the route between the Sea of Japan and the capital.

On the evening of the 2nd, children dance on a separate kind of float called the yoiyama. People here will tell you that if the yoiyama does not go out, the festival has not begun.

The city designated the float and yoiyama rites a cultural property only recently, which says less about their age than about how long a port town can carry something without anyone outside noticing.