The lions move through the town. In Ishioka, in Ibaraki, a three-day festival rises each September, ending on Respect for the Aged Day. Its formal name is the grand rite of Hitachi-no-kuni Sosha Shrine; locally it is simply the Ishioka festival, counted among the three great festivals of the Kanto region. There are three things to watch for. First, a stately great portable shrine bearing the sixteen-petal chrysanthemum crest. Then the floats—open-topped, two or three stories tall, crowned with figures nearly two meters high, so that the whole rises more than five meters. The figures take the shape of gods and historical heroes and are rigged to move up and down; the floats themselves revolve, and on stages at their fronts dancers in okame and hyottoko masks perform. And then the hooded lions. The lion of Ishioka is a hut-like body with a person inside, moving through the streets—thirty-two of them in all, filling the town with a fierce procession. The festival began with sumo offerings in the 1740s, and carries nearly three hundred years behind it. Some five hundred thousand people come. "You may not come home for New Year or Obon, but you come home for the festival," people here are said to say. The town's whole year bends toward these three days, and the roads of autumn Hitachi fill with lions and floats.