On the fourth Saturday of November, the doors of the main hall open at six in the evening, and the men come in.

They wear white. Sarashi cloth, bare feet, nothing else against a Yamaguchi night that has already turned cold. The call goes up — kyodai wasshoi, brother, heave — and it does not stop for the next several hours.

Hofu Tenmangu was built for Sugawara no Michizane, the scholar-statesman exiled from the capital and deified after his death as Tenjin. He came ashore near here on his way west. A century later an imperial messenger arrived at this shrine carrying word that the charges against him had been false. The festival exists to deliver that message again, every year, to someone who is no longer listening.

The palanquin holding his spirit weighs five hundred kilograms. It goes down the fifty-eight stone steps of the main stairway with a sound like something geological, and roughly five thousand men in white move with it, down through the city to Katsuma-no-ura, the old harbour where he landed, and back.

Watching costs nothing and requires no arrangement. The approach is public and the shrine sits twenty minutes' walk from Hofu station. What it requires is standing outside in late November for a long time, which is also what it requires of the men carrying the palanquin. The cold is not an obstacle to the ceremony. It is part of what is being offered.