In March there is still snow in Minamiuonuma — not a dusting but a whole season's accumulation, walls of it along the roads, weight of it on every roof.

On a Saturday night in that landscape, men take off their clothes.

They gather at the Bishamon hall in Urasa, a temple building set among cedars and drifts. Before going in, each man stands under running water and pours it over himself. Steam lifts off his back. Then he enters.

Inside, the hall fills well past any reasonable capacity, and the men begin to push. That is the whole of it. There is nothing to seize, no opposing side, no way to win. They press together in the half-dark and shout one syllable — sanyo — over and over until the sound stops being a word.

Body heat rises. It reaches the cold ceiling, condenses there, and falls back on them as rain. Great candles burn along the walls and do not go out.

Outside, the men waiting their turn stand barefoot in the snow, steaming, shouting the same syllable at the door.

It goes on for hours. Stand back from it and it looks like a method — a way of getting through the last stretch of a very long winter not by enduring it quietly, but by generating as much heat and noise as a few hundred bodies can manage, in one building, on one night, while the snow keeps its distance outside.