The Nagano Tomyo Matsuri was born from the memory of the 1998 Winter Olympics. When the Games came to Nagano, they left behind a wish — for peace, for the kind of hospitality a city discovers when the world arrives on its doorstep — and in 2004 that wish was given form as a festival of light, held each year at the end of February around the great temple of Zenko-ji.

The centerpiece is the illumination of the temple itself, designed by an internationally known lighting artist, so that on winter nights the ancient main hall rises out of the dark in solemn, shifting color. Zenko-ji is one of the oldest and most revered temples in Japan, a place of pilgrimage for centuries, and to see it lit this way is to see the familiar made strange and luminous.

Around it runs the Yume Akari-e, a path of light made from eight hundred cut-paper lanterns. Each one carries the design and the wish of a single citizen — schoolchildren, ordinary residents — so that the road of light is also, quietly, a collection of eight hundred private hopes.

It falls in late February, when snow still lingers in the temple town at the foot of the approach. You walk the lit path in the cold, past the glowing lanterns toward the illuminated hall, and the festival's origin makes a kind of sense: a prayer for peace, kept alive as warmth and light through the last of the winter.