He stands four meters eighty-five: a giant in a plum-dyed robe, two swords at his waist, gazing over the rooftops of a small basin town in eastern Kagoshima. Once a year, on November 3rd, Yagoro-don goes for a walk. He is woken before dawn by drummers making the rounds of Iwagawa; by midday he is dressed, twenty-five bolts of cloth, and drawn through the streets in a procession called the hamakudari, led by conch shells and drums. Who he is depends on whom you ask: a Hayato chieftain who defied the ancient court, or an old man who lived three hundred years. The festival is said to be nine centuries old, and nobody has settled the question yet. Children look up at him and burst into tears; their grandparents press their palms together. Fear and reverence in the same upturned face, something close to the original grammar of the sacred. Stalls fill the streets, the town's population swells for a day, and then Yagoro-don is taken apart and put away. The basin goes quiet again, holding its giant the way some towns hold a secret: patiently, until next November.