Koikoi means come, come. It is not addressed to the gods or to the town but to the guests: the people staying in the inns, who in most Japanese festivals are spectators and here are not.

Yamanaka Onsen built this festival, in the early 1960s, around the problem of how to let a stranger join. The solution was to borrow the steps. The dancing follows Tankobushi, a coal miners' song whose movements almost everyone in Japan already knows from summer festivals, so a visitor who has never been to Kaga can watch for thirty seconds and fall in.

By day the streets belong to processions: shrines carried by the bathhouse women, shrines carried by the young men, and a great lion that works its way along the narrow lanes. Yamanaka has made lacquerware for centuries, so one of the portable shrines is a bowl.

At dusk it changes to Yamanakabushi, the local folk song, sung outside the wooden theatre at the centre of town. Townspeople, geiko, and guests still in the cotton robes their inn gave them dance in the same circle.

The rest of the year, this is a quiet valley where you can hear the Kakusenkei gorge running below the town. Knowing that is what makes two days of noise worth having.