It May Eat People

A silver disc stands in front of Hakui Station. Aliens are painted on shop shutters; flying saucers adorn the manhole covers. This town flies the banner of "UFO Town," selling the disc as a cheerful mascot. An ordinary bit of regional boosterism. Soft, cute, slightly unpolished. Thinking just that, most people let the town slide past their car windows as a waypoint on the road to the Noto Peninsula.

But peel back that signboard, just once.

What emerges from underneath is no mascot. It is a light that eats people.

The oldest reason this town calls itself UFO Town goes by the name "Sohachibun." It is also called "Chūhachibun."

The name comes from a Buddhist ritual instrument: the myōhachi, or nyōhachi. A disc-shaped metal cymbal that priests clap together with both hands at funerals and memorial rites. The "chiin," "jaan" sound of that very implement. A mysterious fire resembling its shape appears on autumn nights, halfway up Mount Bijō in Hakui.

Not one of them. Several lights link together in a row and drift slowly along the mountain's spine, from east to west. Glowing, they cross the night ridgeline in a line. Mount Bijō is also called Mount Raiga, "Thunder Peak." At its highest point sleep the Ame-no-miya burial mounds, thought to belong to an ancient king of Noto. Night after night, a procession of lights moves across the flank of the mountain that bears the king's grave. The people of this land saw it. And because the shape resembled the sohachibun ritual cymbal, they handed it down as the "Sohachibun legend."

Disc-shaped, glowing, flying in formation. In modern UFO terms, it overlaps with the so-called Adamski type, like an overturned pot lid. So later generations call it a UFO. But before rushing to that reinterpretation, I want to first listen to what the legend itself was saying. Up to this point, it is not much different from tales of mysterious fire found everywhere. Fox-fire, will-o'-the-wisp, spirit-flames. Across Japan, on mountains and marshes, people have named lights of unknown origin, feared them, and passed the stories on. But Hakui's has a chilling sentence found in no other fire-tale.

In a regional history compiled in 1928, the *Gazetteer of Kashima District, Ishikawa Prefecture*, its origin is recorded. The sohachibun, it says, petitioned the gongen-sama — the deity of Keta Taisha, the grand shrine of Noto — like this:

And the gongen-sama permitted it. "So long as the cock has not crowed, very well," he said.

Read it again. From dusk until the cock crows, you may take and eat people — the most exalted deity in Noto has issued a license to devour humans. This is no mere fire-tale. Not subduing it, not sealing it away. A god, on conditions, authorizing the eating of people. In all of Japan's fire-lore, I know of no other account that goes this far.

The legend even details the nightly route of the sohachibun once it had its permission. At dusk it appears from the Rokusho Shrine at Hasaka, crosses the mountains of Yoshikawa around two in the morning, wanders about the area of Kanamaru, and drifts on to Yanaida. When the cock crows, it reluctantly returns to the Rokusho Shrine it came from. Plotted on a map, it traces a wide circuit through human settlements in a single night — from Haita in Noto Town, through Kanamaru in Nakanoto Town, to Yanaida in Hakui. A genuine "hunting patrol route." The light was not merely drifting. It was patrolling a fixed path every night, seeking prey.

Yet this tale has a saving trap the god himself laid. That cock's cry that signals the end of the hunt — it is not a real cock. It was the gongen-sama himself, imitating the sound. Long before dawn, the god would let out a false cockcrow. And the dutiful sohachibun, believing "day has broken," would reluctantly turn back. In other words, the god cut short, every night, with his own impression, the very license to devour that he had granted.

Permit, then restrain. Release, then pull back. The god of this land kept up a perilous tug-of-war with the man-eating light, night after night. The god stands neither on the side of the devourer nor of the devoured. He holds both reins, keeping the balance at the very edge. The unease of Hakui's night sky was, just barely, calmed by the presence of this "god who restrains while permitting."

There are records of people who actually saw it. The same gazetteer records a scene that the previous head priest of Saishō-ji temple in Ushiroyama witnessed in his youth. Late at night, as he approached the middle slope of Mount Bijō, the area suddenly grew bright. He looked, and a light like a tall paper lantern rose abruptly over the ridge and slid straight down toward the valley, slow and steady. On his way back to the temple, the priest surely saw it. The light has been witnessed.

But about the true nature of this fire, there is yet another, entirely different, and far more pitiful telling. The theory that the sohachibun was once a human being.

Long ago, Hakui had a great lagoon called Ōchigata. Wider than now, its waters reached the foot of the hills. The Keta gongen-sama reasoned that if the lagoon were drained and turned to rice fields, the villagers would prosper. But to drain it, one needed the "tide-drying jewel" (shiohiru-tama), with the power to dry the waters away. And the one who held that jewel was a single monk named Shōhachibō. He showed the jewel to no one, keeping it tucked carefully in his robes.

So the gongen-sama devised a scheme. Disguising himself as a beautiful woman, he visited Shōhachibō, flattered him by every means, and got him thoroughly drunk. Delighted by the beauty's pouring, Shōhachibō collapsed dead drunk and fell into a deep, snoring sleep. In that moment, the gongen-sama slipped the tide-drying jewel from the monk's robes and hid it deep within the shrine.

Waking to find the jewel gone, Shōhachibō understood everything. "So that woman — this is the shrine's doing." He stormed to the shrine in a rage, but the gongen-sama declared: "If you want it so badly, I need not refuse to return it. But come here once more, by the time the first cock crows tomorrow morning." Of course, he had no intention of returning it. The god had seen through it — that the heavy-sleeping Shōhachibō could never make the first cockcrow. He imposed an impossible condition and sent him away.

Wanting his jewel back yet unable to wake early, failing again and again to keep an impossible promise, Shōhachibō grew frantic, suffered, and finally went mad and died. His vengeful soul became a fire-spirit that wanders the middle slopes of Mount Bijō. At dusk, when the cherry blossoms have scattered and the air turns warm, several fires link in a row and move toward the shrine, vanishing as they enter the valley, then reappearing on the mountain — that fire, they say, is the unappeased grudge of the monk who was deceived, robbed of his jewel, and driven to madness and death.

And one more thing. Hakui's sohachibun has also at times been called the "utsuro-bune," the hollow ship. Something of unknown nature, drifting ashore from beyond the sea — this fire belongs to that ancient lineage of legends found all along Japan's coasts. Indeed, the Noto Peninsula has a tale of abduction lingering in the villages at the foot of Mount Bijō: "a pot lid falls from the sky and carries people off." Children who played outside too late were threatened, "the pot lid will fall and snatch you away." A disc-shaped thing descending from the sky, carrying people off. The sohachibun's "I will take and eat people" and this "pot lid that snatches people" share the same fear.

A god who permits man-eating. The grudge-fire of a monk robbed of his jewel and driven to mad death. The hollow ship drifting in from the sea. The flying pot lid that snatches people away. Under the single name "sohachibun," all these faces are layered together. What the people of Hakui saw in the darkness overhead was decidedly no cute UFO. It was the very memory of the land — old and dark — where god and human, devourer and devoured, robber and robbed, dissolve into one another night after night.

It is from here that this town's claim to be "UFO Town" begins.

One in Three Has Seen It

Hakui has a saying hard to believe at first. One in three residents of this town has seen a UFO.

The source of that figure is uncertain. But it cannot be dismissed as baseless hype either. Inside the Cosmo Isle Hakui museum sits a thick file binding together UFO sighting accounts submitted by visitors. Tourists, staff, locals — each writes down "this is what I saw." That accumulation is genuinely there. The hall even displays a model of an alien being dissected, said to be faithfully reconstructed from witness testimony. It is in poor taste. But that poor taste stands boldly upon the premise that "here, there are people who have seen."

The stage most often named for sightings is the Chirihama Nagisa Driveway.

At the base of the Noto Peninsula, running about eight kilometers north to south along the Sea of Japan. It is the only public road on sand in Japan where you can drive a car right along the water's edge. The sand here is fine and even-grained. Sand carried by rivers like the Tedori, borne by coastal currents and seasonal winds, accumulates and packs hard when soaked with seawater. So an ordinary tire can run along the surf. You ride a straight line of nothing but sea and sky, tires pressing the sand. A strangely flat, strangely wide eight-kilometer runway, found nowhere else in the world.

It is at this Chirihama that UFO sightings are reported most frequently. Half joking, half serious, even this explanation is offered: the only eight-kilometer beach in Japan packed flat enough for cars to drive straight onto. Might it be, not only for human cars, but for things descending from the sky, the most landable of runways?

You may laugh. But the town takes that story up in earnest. Cosmo Isle's beloved mascot, the alien "Thunder-kun," has an official backstory. While sightseeing on Earth, his spacecraft broke down and he crash-landed here at Chirihama, and now he works part-time at the museum to earn the repair money. The town has woven Chirihama, as "the beach where an alien came down," even into its mascot's tale.

And the very first spark that made this town call itself "UFO Town" was, from the start, something descending from the sky. The sohachibun of the previous chapter. And the words of the man who launched the town's revival, when he found that legend, are also vividly concrete. What he read in an old document was the line: "Something shaped like a straw hat was flying from the western mountains to the eastern mountains." A straw hat. An overturned dish. The very shape of a flying saucer. In the sky an Edo-period Noto man looked up at, something shaped like a straw hat was, indeed, flying.

Come this far, and you want to go. Stand on Chirihama at dusk and it falls into place. The Sea of Japan on the left, dunes on the right, hard-packed sand underfoot. Nothing blocks the view. As the sun sinks, the sky darkens from the edges, and stars descend over the sea. Live looking up at a sky this open, from a beach this flat, every night — and it is no wonder you would see something in the sky, no wonder you would come to think "it is descending here."

But let me introduce one person with cool, clear eyes. The very man who built this "UFO Town," Takano Jōsen. The father of UFO Town himself declares:

The mastermind of UFO Town says he distrusts the sighting accounts. Then what does he believe in? He continues:

Here, the intelligence of this town shows plainly. What Hakui sells with UFOs is no fluffy dream. Not the count of individual testimonies of "I saw it," but the fact that there is a nation that, while denying, keeps investigating in earnest — look at that instead. The man who built a town where one in three claims to have seen did not get drunk on sighting accounts; he fixed his gaze on the national-scale seriousness behind them.

And how far that "seriousness" has now come in America — the small town of Hakui was decades ahead of it.

A Bluff Brings the Real Thing

A man-eating light bearing the name of a Buddhist instrument. How did it become a genuine spacecraft? The key to the story is one man. Takano Jōsen. Born in Hakui in 1955. Without this man, neither a NASA craft nor the world's only lunar probe would ever have come to a rural town in Noto.

Line up his career alone and he is a strange man. He worked in Tokyo as a broadcast writer and TV program planner, handling UFO features on the late-night show "11PM" (a monster program that peaked at 48 percent viewership). He returned home, succeeded his family's Nichiren-sect temple Myōhō-ji, and became its head priest. Alongside that, from 1984 he served as a temporary employee of Hakui City Hall. A head priest, a former TV man, a city hall temp. The titles alone make for a life that never runs straight.

In his youth, he met one figure. Colonel Coleman von Keviczky, a former United Nations public-information officer. Hearing he was an "exceptional figure" versed in UFOs, Takano so wanted to meet him that he wrote a letter. As they corresponded, the colonel said, "You're interesting. Come to New York." Saving up from part-time work to make the trip, Takano was dragged all over the world — to Brazil, to Frankfurt. The colonel taught him this: "If you want to grow big, graft yourself onto big people. Connect to me and I'll share all my connections. But don't *use* those connections — *make use of* them." These words would pay off later.

From his TV days came incidents like this. One night while reporting in America, the moment he put his hand on a motel doorknob, a red laser sight came to rest squarely on the back of his hand. A clear threat. Perhaps the subject he was handling had touched something it should not. He knew in his bones, from a young age, that the theme of UFOs led into territory no laughing matter.

Back home, joining the city office, what surprised him was that no one ever acted. He spent a year drafting a revival plan and said, "This will change Hakui." He asked, "Has the world ever once moved as written on paper?" Naturally he was scolded — "a mere temp." Still he would not back down. The Buddhist term "training" is written to mean correcting as you go, he argued. When he asked his superior, "May I attempt a town revival?", the answer was, "Do it if you can. You're a temp, so not a single yen of budget."

So he started, with zero budget, on his own.

The spark was an old-document course he was in charge of. Reading local historical documents, he hit upon the line, "Something shaped like a straw hat was flying from the western mountains to the eastern mountains." Could this be a UFO? The record of a mysterious fire sleeping in his hometown's old documents became, before the eyes of a former UFO-program director, the seed of a town revival.

First, he gathered UFO enthusiasts. Five hundred yen monthly, twelve members. Young people in their twenties and thirties. He named it the "Hakui Mystery Club." But all he had on hand was a single photocopy of the old document. That alone got nowhere. Glancing at his members, he spotted Miyazaki, the son of an udon-shop owner. "Your place is an udon shop, right? Make me a UFO udon." The father vehemently opposed it as "a disgrace to the family line," but they carried it out on the very day that father was away at a guild meeting.

Triangular fried tofu with naruto and daikon sprouts heaped in a spiral, garnished with wakame and a raw egg. "It's a UFO landed in a grassy field on a moonlit night. Behold: the original UFO udon." When he explained it to a tough-looking reporter from Weekly Playboy, the reporter closed his eyes once. As Takano sweated, bracing for the table to be flipped, the reporter snapped his eyes open and said, "That's interesting." So a six-page feature was put together. The headline: "A UFO base has been built on the Noto Peninsula." When all that actually existed was a single bowl of UFO udon.

His way of thinking is thoroughly upside down. "I don't think about what happens if I fail. I think about what happens if, by some miracle, I succeed — what happens if it turns a profit. Then the excitement won't stop. I keep that going."

Next he conceived: "What if we could hold an international UFO conference?" In 1990, the Space and UFO International Symposium. Eight of them went up to Tokyo to raise funds, and a single-sheet proposal got them turned away at the door. Heading first to Nissin Foods, he asked for a ten-million-yen sponsorship with a "UFO bun" and a statement of purpose as gifts, but the PR director showed him a thick proposal document and admonished him, "You're doing what not even a corporate racketeer would do." There he learned how to write a proper proposal and remade it. As a result, going company to company, he raised about forty million yen. To Hakui, population twenty thousand, more than forty-five thousand people are said to have flocked. He invited his "old man," Colonel Coleman, too, and put him on stage as a former UN public-information officer. More than thirty years before the American government would take up UFOs as a national agenda in congressional hearings, this small town in Noto had set UFOs upon the speaker's podium of an international conference.

The conference's success set in motion talk of a facility to anchor "UFO Town." At the time, the Ministry of Home Affairs (now the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications) had a system under which the state would shoulder ninety percent of the budget for pioneering projects. The project name he submitted was — "Dejima of Space: the Noto-Hakui Project." Just as Edo-period Dejima in Nagasaki was the sole window to the West, if a UFO is the modern Black Ship, Japan too may have a window to space. The ministry officials bit. "That's interesting." A total of 5.26 billion yen, ninety percent of it from the state. The city's share was 526 million yen, and a museum would be built.

But there was a problem. Most of the budget vanished into the attached library and grand hall, leaving only 250 million yen for the essential space exhibits. The contractor's proposal was nothing but planet models. He said, "Can't these be swapped for real spacecraft and rockets?" He was laughed off. So he went straight to the mayor. "I'll go negotiate. Just give me three months to go to America."

Flying alone to America and tracing Colonel Coleman's connections, the doors of NASA opened. Led into the storage vault, he pleaded, "Lend me this, and this, and this." In the blank for the desired rental term, he wrote — one hundred years. The official burst out laughing. "I've never seen a Japanese like you." He pressed on. "If you lend to Hong Kong for a hundred years, lend to us for a hundred years too." "Interesting." And they truly did lend them.

The former Soviet Union was not so easy. Just after the USSR's collapse, many military men wanted to sell off spacecraft. The first estimate was ten million yen per unit. But once he had it shipped via NASA to America, the price had leapt to sixty million yen. "Why has it gone sixfold?" NASA's PR director whispered, "Takano, it's the real thing — absolutely buy it." Still he gambled. "At this price I don't need it. Take it back to Russia." Negotiations broke down. The next day, when they met in the hotel restaurant, the other side wouldn't even speak. Their eyes all but said "I'll kill you." Eventually the talks reluctantly resumed, and under the condition "if we can prove here that it's genuine, the check is yours," they let him keep the equipment, and in the end he purchased it at the original price.

Thus came to Noto a Vostok capsule returned from space, a backup unit of Luna 24 — the only one of its kind left in the world — and a Molniya communications satellite.

"I wanted to insist on the real thing."

A town revival begun on bluff brought genuine spacecraft. A former UFO-program director picked up the old document's mysterious fire, raised an international conference from a single bowl of udon, wrote "one hundred years" on a contract, slugged it out over price with a Soviet soldier, and carried the world's only lunar probe to Noto. The dark legend of the sohachibun was, by this man's outrageous earnestness, flipped over to the side of hope.

That said, "the real thing" needs a careful caveat too. There is a claim that the Vostok return capsule on display is actually a Zenit unmanned-reconnaissance-satellite hull — identical in design and structure — with a mannequin placed inside. But that is a matter of exhibit detail. Both the equipment borrowed from NASA on a hundred-year contract and the equipment bought from the USSR at the original price remain genuine items that truly passed through the front lines of space development.

And the story of this "man who insists on the real thing" is no curiosity unique to Hakui. On the far side of the Earth, in America, there is a land of strikingly similar structure. A place that, while still bearing an old curse-legend, became the front line of the modern search for UFOs.

Why Does Cursed Land Call to the Sky?

Here, let us leave Noto for a moment. The story flies to the far side of the Earth, to Utah, USA. To grasp the true nature of what happened in Hakui, it is quickest to set it beside one other land.

Uintah County, Utah. Amid harsh steppe sits a ranch of about 512 acres. Skinwalker Ranch. Its name derives from the "skinwalker" of Navajo lore — an evil witch who changes into animals. It is a land the Ute and Navajo peoples have long shunned and avoided approaching.

What has been reported on this ranch is extraordinary. Cattle vanish without a trace. Or are found brutally mutilated. In the sky, UFOs and orbs of light. A huge beast with blazing red eyes that takes not a scratch when shot. A destructive magnetic field, invisible yet able to derange instruments. Investigator Colm Kelleher and journalist George Knapp say they witnessed or heard of nearly a hundred such occurrences.

Let me note, for the record. These "phenomena" are not established fact. A former owner who lived on the land for sixty years testifies that "there were no paranormal events whatsoever," and skeptics point out that the simplest explanation is "the family fabricated the tales before selling the ranch to a tycoon." Physical evidence has not emerged in all these decades. This is, like Hakui's sohachibun legend, the realm of "it is reported that."

But the true awe of this story is not whether the phenomena are real. It lies in the undeniable fact that the legend moved a nation.

In 1996, the tycoon Robert Bigelow bought the ranch — because, it is said, he became convinced by the tales of slaughtered cattle and strange lights. He poured private funds into founding a research organization and had the ranch investigated. And in 2005, a book summarizing that investigation appeared in the world. *Hunt for the Skinwalker.*

In 2007, one man read this book. James Lacatski, an employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and a ballistic-missile physicist. He contacted Bigelow, gained permission to visit the ranch, and went to the site. There, in the ranch house, he records having seen up close something like a yellow, tubular, semi-transparent device. That inexplicable experience. Lacatski conveyed it to higher-ups, and the matter reached, by way of the tycoon Bigelow, Senator Harry Reid. Reid and his fellow senators Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye judged the matter worth attention, and slipped a single line into the Defense Department's budget.

That single line directed twenty-two million dollars toward UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) research. This program, called AAWSAP, is the very source of the system by which the Pentagon now officially investigates UFOs. Ostensibly named "Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification," its actual substance as UFO research was later acknowledged by the program's own director.

To sum up, it goes like this. A land bearing the name of a Navajo evil witch, shunned for generations by Native peoples, came around in the end to ignite the Pentagon's UFO investigation. A place with an old curse-legend became the flashpoint of the modern search for aliens. That is the skeleton of what happened at Skinwalker Ranch.

Reading this far, have you noticed? This is exactly the same shape as Hakui.

Hakui has the sohachibun. The man-eating light, the pot lid that snatches people, the forest even priests enter with eyes closed (this comes in the next chapter). A land where the old legend of "descending evil" was deposited thick over a thousand years. That land, through one man named Takano Jōsen, gave rise to an international conference that hosted a former UN public-information officer, and drew genuine spacecraft to Noto.

Skinwalker Ranch reached, from a Navajo witch through Bigelow, the DIA, and the Senate, a twenty-two-million-dollar Pentagon budget. Hakui reached, from the sohachibun through Takano, Colonel Coleman, and the Ministry of Home Affairs, a 5.2-billion-yen museum and genuine spacecraft. A land bearing a curse-legend draws to itself national-scale investment in space. The same magnetism works, in exactly the same way, across two lands on opposite sides of the Pacific.

Why does this happen? The order is probably reversed. People do not fear a land because they saw something in the sky. The more earnestly a land has feared the darkness overhead, the more earnestly its people seek to know its true nature. Because the fear is dense, they cannot help investigating. Because the avoidance runs deep, they cannot look away. Both the Navajo of Skinwalker Ranch and the people of Hakui's sohachibun have spent centuries gazing at "what must not be seen." The density of that gaze drew, in modern times, a defense budget on one side and genuine spacecraft on the other.

The UFO is no longer the soft ornament of regional boosterism. In America the Department of Defense handles UAP through a permanent body called AARO, the Federal Aviation Administration has erased the word "UFO" from its control manuals and standardized on "UAP," and Congress has made the reporting of military intercept operations a legal obligation. In 2023, a former Air Force intelligence officer testified at a hearing to a "decades-long crashed-craft recovery program" and the "recovery of non-human biological material" (the Department of Defense denies this). The unidentified in the sky is now a subject that nations handle in official documents.

And at its front line, a small town in Noto has stood for decades. Hakui occupies, on the map of the world's UFO phenomena, the very same point as Utah's cursed ranch. And seated at the center of that map is an old shrine north of the town, its back to the Sea of Japan — Keta Taisha, and its forest that no one may see.

The Forest You Enter Blind, the Cormorant That Vanishes into Darkness

Where the sohachibun headed night after night. Where the souls snatched by the pot lid drift ashore. All the unease of Hakui's sky converges on a single point. Keta Taisha. The grand shrine of Noto Province. Since the days of the Man'yōshū, this old shrine has sat at the center of the region's faith.

The *Man'yōshū* contains a poem by Ōtomo no Yakamochi, written in 748, when as governor of Etchū Province he toured Noto and visited the "Keta Shrine." In the Heian-period *Engishiki* it was ranked among the Myōjin Taisha. By history alone, it reaches nearly thirteen hundred years. But this shrine's true awe lies not in the splendor of its halls. It lies in the forest behind them.

Behind the main hall spreads about thirty-three thousand square meters — roughly ten thousand tsubo — of primeval forest. Chinquapin, tabu, camellia, wild cinnamon. Giant broadleaf evergreens grow untouched, as in ancient times. For its rarity it is designated a Natural Monument of Japan. This forest is called the "Irazu-no-mori" — the Forest One Does Not Enter.

As the name says, it is a forest people are not permitted to enter. For over four hundred years, the Kaga domain too protected this forest and forbade entry to all but the priests. But what sets this forest apart from an ordinary sacred preserve is this: even that single priest permitted to enter is not allowed to properly see the forest.

According to the shrine's tradition, the priest enters the forest only to perform a rite at the inner sanctuary deep within, on New Year's Eve. And when he does, he passes through blindfolded.

Eyes closed, he enters. Even the one human being qualified to enter must not see its depths. This goes far beyond a ban on entry. It is a taboo against sight itself. Why must it not be seen? What lies within? No one tells. They cannot. Because there is no one who has seen.

This forest holds one more mystery. The outer enshrined deity of Keta Taisha is Ōnamuchi-no-mikoto. By another name, Ōkuninushi-no-mikoto. The same deity of marriage-bonds as in Izumo. So Keta Taisha is known as a shrine of matchmaking, drawing young worshippers. Yet deep in the Forest One Does Not Enter, said to be enshrined in the inner sanctuary, is a different deity. Susanoo-no-mikoto and Kushinada-hime. The raging god who slew the eight-headed serpent, and his consort.

The one who greets worshippers out front is the bright deity of marriage-bonds. The one dwelling deep in the forest no one may see is a raging god. The visible god and the god-that-must-not-be-seen are different. Behind the ordered outer faith, deeper still, something older and more violent is hidden, which people are forbidden to look upon directly. The Forest One Does Not Enter covers that inner presence, literally, with forest, erasing it from sight.

Moreover, according to the shrine's origin-legend, the very purpose for which the enshrined deity Ōnamuchi came to this land was subjugation. Leading more than three hundred deities, he entered Noto by boat from Izumo, slew the monstrous birds and great serpents ravaging the land, opened the sea routes, and settled as its guardian deity. The land of Hakui was opened by a god slaying monsters. And even the place-name "Hakui" derives from a monstrous-bird subjugation. Iwatsukuwake-no-mikoto, on the command of Emperor Suinin, shot down with his bow a monstrous bird tormenting the local people, and the three dogs he had with him ate its feathers. "Ate the feathers" (ha-kui) shifted to become "Hakui."

Lined up, the bass note of this land comes into view. A god opens the land by slaying monstrous birds and serpents, a place-name is born from eating a monstrous bird's feathers, a man-eating light circuits the night sky, a pot lid snatches people away. Hakui is a land that has faced "things that come from the sky" since ancient times. Sometimes shooting them down, sometimes the dogs eating the feathers, sometimes the god cutting down the great serpent — and what could not be vanquished, it sealed and hid deep in the forest no one may see.

And is that forest silent? It is not. The wind blowing in from the Sea of Japan shakes the primeval forest, and the crowns of the giant trees resound. The people of this land called that sound, heard from the depths of a forest no one can enter, the "uminari-kobōzu" — the little sea-roar monk. Unseen, but surely there, something. People could not help but give the presence a name.

And this shrine has a rite staged upon darkness itself. The Cormorant Festival (Umatsuri). An Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property of Japan. Every year on December 16, at three in the morning, it is performed in a pitch-black main hall.

The protagonist is a single cormorant. Several days before the rite, on a sheer cliff in Uura-machi, Nanao City, about forty kilometers east of the shrine, a wild cormorant is caught alive by the hands of the Konishi family, who pass down their art from a single heir to the next across generations. The moment it is caught, the cormorant becomes a god. Called "U-sama," it is made to fast until the rite is over.

U-sama is placed in a basket woven by three men called utoribe — cormorant-catchers — and carried on foot the roughly forty kilometers to Keta Taisha, over two nights and three days. This is the "U-sama Procession." As the party passes through villages calling out "utoribe, utoribe," residents along the road come out and press their palms together. The elders say, "You cannot greet the New Year without worshipping U-sama." A single wild bird is carried, as a god, along the winter roads of Noto.

On the sixteenth, just past three in the morning. The rite begins in the main hall, prayers are offered, the offerings withdrawn — and then, leaving only a single lamp within the hall, all four sides sink into utter darkness. The utoribe carry the cormorant basket before the main hall, and a solemn exchange passes between them and the priests. Presently it is announced, "Release the cormorant," and the utoribe release it into the darkness. The cormorant rises, drawn to the hall's single lamp, and alights on a stand within. If it ascends the stand smoothly, good fortune; if it falters, ill. The year's fortune is divined by the cormorant's movements.

When the rite ends, U-sama is carried to nearby Ichinomiya Beach and released. The cormorant takes flight into the dark sky and vanishes, its whereabouts unknown.

Here is a beautiful symmetry. The sohachibun was a light descending from the sky. A descending evil that eats people, that snatches people. The U-sama of the Cormorant Festival, on the other hand, becomes a god in the darkness, rises drawn to the lamp, and at last vanishes into the night sky. The thing that descends, and the thing that ascends and vanishes. Keta Taisha holds them both. It hides a raging god deep in the forest and returns to the sky a bird made god in the dark. The thing that must not be seen, and the thing that vanishes. This shrine takes upon itself, in a single body, all the awe people have ever held toward the darkness overhead.

That is the kind of town Hakui is. The people of Edo gave the sky's light the name "sohachibun." The people of Noto entrusted the New Year's fortune to a cormorant of the dark. And in the modern age, one man called genuine spacecraft from that same far reach of the sky. The methods differ, but the direction they face has always been the same. The unseen, overhead. Hakui is a town that has spent a thousand years facing that unknown, head-on.

Look up at the sky. In this town, something may be descending, and something may be ascending. And only those who have gazed at it in earnest will, at times, draw the real thing toward them.