Owara Kaze no Bon — luxury itineraries and concierge.

Owara Kaze no Bon, from an operator's side.

Owara Kaze no Bon is held in the old silk town of Yatsuo, above Toyama, on 1, 2 and 3 September. There is no shouting and no percussion of the kind that carries a Tohoku parade. Dancers in straw hats pulled low over their faces move slowly through sloping lantern-lit lanes to the kokyu, a bowed string instrument with a thin, mournful line, and the dancing continues deep into the night. Originally a prayer against the typhoon winds at harvest, it is melancholy rather than celebratory. It is also, for an agent, one of the most awkward files in the Japanese calendar: the town is tiny and the best of it happens after midnight.

• Yatsuo has almost no accommodation, so nearly every visitor arrives and leaves the same night, and the last services out fall before the dancing is at its best.
• The atmosphere depends on quiet and on darkness, which puts a hard limit on how large a group can be moved through the lanes without becoming the thing that spoils it.
• Clients expecting a festival in the ordinary sense will be disappointed by the first hour; the case for staying until the small hours has to be made before departure, not on the night.

Basing decides the file.

Toyama city, with a private vehicle for the evening. Yatsuo's own inventory is negligible and locally held, and staying in the town is not a realistic plan for most files. The drive is short, and the point of the private vehicle is not comfort but the ability to leave when the dancing ends rather than when the timetable says.

When to start.

Twelve months for the vehicle and the guiding, which are the scarce parts. Toyama rooms are easier and can follow, but the private night transfer is committed locally well ahead and is the element that makes the whole evening possible.