Dōsojin are the layer of the tradition that no institution touches. They sit at village boundaries, mountain passes and forks in the road, most characteristically in Nagano and the Kantō region, carved as a male and female pair holding hands or drinking together, worn nearly featureless by weather. Their functions are guarding the boundary against whatever comes from outside, protecting travellers, and — because they are a couple — fertility, easy childbirth and marital harmony, which is why some are unambiguously phallic. Villagers leave sake and rice; nobody administers this and no priest is required. In the New Year dondo-yaki or sai-no-kami fires of central Japan, the stones are sometimes included in the burning of the year's decorations. The Meiji shrine mergers, which consolidated tens of thousands of small sites, largely could not reach them because they were not shrines in any registrable sense.