Matsuri is where Japanese social restraint is formally suspended, and the suspension is licensed rather than accidental. Under the beams of a mikoshi, several hours in and a good deal of sake down, with sixty people shouting the same syllable and moving something extremely heavy in a way that hurts, participants describe the individual dropping out — a state that is closer to a crowd phenomenon than to anything contemplative, and none the less valued for that. Anthropologists have written about the festival as ritual inversion: the hierarchies of the neighbourhood are suspended for a day, the ordinarily silent are loud, and behaviour that would be unthinkable on any other date is expected. The great urban festivals — Gion in Kyoto, Tenjin in Osaka, Kanda in Tokyo, Nebuta in Aomori, the Danjiri in Kishiwada where people are killed most years — draw millions. For many participants this is the entirety of their religious life, and they organise the year around it.