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.