Etchu-Yatsuo

Yatsuo is a small town of stone-paved slopes and fine-latticed houses built on a river terrace south of Toyama, and for three nights a year it becomes something else. Owara Kaze no Bon runs from 1 to 3 September and has done for more than three centuries: dancers in straw hats that hide the face move slowly through the streets to shamisen, kokyu — a bowed fiddle that appears in almost no other Japanese folk music — and drum, under thousands of paper lanterns. It is a wind-appeasing rite before the typhoon season and the music is in a minor key. Nothing about it is boisterous.

The town is worth the trip on an ordinary day too. Suwamachi Hondori is on the national list of a hundred best roads, and outside the festival the slopes are silent, which is a rare thing for a place this photogenic. During the three nights the population multiplies many times over and accommodation within reach books out months in advance.

The dance itself is deliberately understated rather than showy. Two forms are performed: a men's version with quicker, more angular arm movements suggesting scything or planting, and a women's version that is slower and more fluid, hands tracing curves in the air. Both move in loose lines up and down the sloped streets rather than staying fixed to a stage, so the dance drifts past onlookers instead of the other way around. Local troupes rehearse through the summer, and in Yatsuo learning the steps is treated as an ordinary part of growing up in the town rather than a special pursuit.

The setting does a lot of the work. Yatsuo sits on a terrace above the Imizu River, and its streets climb and dip between old merchant houses with fine wooden lattice fronts, so lantern light falls across sloped stone rather than flat pavement. Outside the festival dates the town returns to an unhurried rhythm — small shops, the odd lantern maker still at work, the sound of the river below the terrace edge. Visitors who can't make the September dates but want a feel for the place often come in spring or autumn, when the light on the stone slopes and latticework is soft and the streets are close to empty.