Ōharae, the great purification, is performed on the last day of the sixth month and the last day of the twelfth, and it purifies the entire community at once. The chinowa is a ring of woven miscanthus reed, sometimes two metres across, set at the shrine gate; worshippers pass through it in a figure-of-eight pattern — left, right, left — while reciting a set verse. Many shrines also distribute hitogata, small paper figures cut in human shape: you write your name and age on it, rub it over your body or breathe on it to transfer the accumulated pollution, and hand it back to be floated down a river or burned. The liturgy read at the rite, the Ōharae no kotoba, is among the oldest surviving Japanese texts, recorded in the tenth-century Engishiki, and its catalogue of offences to be swept away includes crop damage, incest, bestiality, leprosy and injury from creeping insects, in one undifferentiated list. Nobody confesses anything. The pollution is simply removed, in bulk, twice a year, for everybody.