A dance to send off the ancestors fills the night. When Obon ends, Okinawa begins its eisa. Young people beat drums and move to the sound of the sanshin, sending ancestral spirits on their way. Once a village rite, it grew after the war into the Zento Eisa Festival, where youth groups from across the islands converge. Large drums, hand drums, and small paranku keep the rhythm as the dancers form ranks, leap, turn, and call out, their movements bold yet strangely close to prayer. Okinawa City was once called Koza, a town shaped by the nearby American base, and eisa carries the heat of that mingled history. At summer's end, with the scent of night flowers in the air, the drumming does not stop. Before long, even the onlookers find their bodies beginning to move.