Kitakyushu, Fukuoka

Before the restaurants open, the chefs of Hakata come here. Yanagibashi Rengo-ichiba has been supplying Fukuoka's food industry since the Showa era — a covered market of narrow lanes and vendors who have occupied the same spots for decades, selling the specific ingredients that make this city's cuisine what it is.

Fish from the Genkai Sea: mackerel, flatfish, conger eel, the seasonal specialties that rotate through the stalls. Vegetables from Itoshima and the surrounding Chikuzen region. The dried goods — konbu, dried sardines, the particular bonito flakes used for Hakata ramen broth — from suppliers who have been providing them to the same restaurants for generations.

Walking through it among professional buyers with the same seriousness produces a different quality of attention than shopping in a place designed for visitors. You see what is valued, what is in season, what is being prepared for tonight, before tonight exists. Fukuoka is known for its food. Yanagibashi is a reminder that famous cuisines come from supply chains that run considerably deeper.

By day and by night, it wears two faces.

In July in Tobata, in Kitakyushu, four great floats move through the streets. By day they are nobori-yamagasa: a tall platform hung with red and white banners and a send-off panel embroidered in gold and silver thread, formal and ornate. By night everything is stripped away, and on the same platform the crew stacks three hundred and nine paper lanterns in twelve tiers—a pyramid of light nearly ten meters tall. To the call of "yoitosa, yoitosa" the young men lift it, and the red tower sways slowly through the dark. People call it, simply, the lantern mountain.

The festival began in 1803. Plague had spread through Tobata, and when the people prayed to the deity Suga and it passed, they built a float in thanks. That was more than two hundred and twenty years ago. Four floats, kept by three shrines, have carried the tradition ever since.

Together with the Hakata and Kokura Gion festivals it is one of Fukuoka's three great summer festivals—a national Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property, and part of the UNESCO-listed float festivals.

The great moment comes on the middle evening, at the competition before the Tobata ward office, where four large floats and four smaller ones carried by junior-high students gather in the dark.

Go after sunset, and wait for the banners of the day to become the lanterns of the night. When the red tower begins to sway, you understand something about why a town keeps a thing like this alive for two centuries.

The drum is struck while walking.

In July in Kokura, in Kitakyushu, the sound of drums fills the streets around Kokura Castle. Drums are mounted on floats and struck as the floats are pulled—and struck on both faces at once, two players front and back, and struck while moving. It is a style you will not easily find elsewhere.

The festival is four hundred years old. Hosokawa Tadaoki is said to have begun it, modeling it on Kyoto's Gion festival, for a people worn down by plague and disaster. At first there were flutes and gongs; the drum came to the center only later.

There are two sounds: the low weight of the great drum, and the dry, sharp cut of the jangara, a hand gong. Together they become the sound of a Kokura summer. The drums appear even in the classic film The Rickshaw Man.

It is the annual rite of Yasaka Shrine within Kokura Castle, a national Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property, and one of Fukuoka's three great Gion festivals. Over three days—a children's competition on the middle day, a grand review on the last—some three hundred thousand people come.

Go and stand near the drums. Heard up close, the double-faced beat lands in your stomach. With the castle behind you, the whole town shakes with drumming. That is the season here.