Following a series of tragedies including her father’s sudden death, her own critical accident and the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, Yukari Chikura finds solace by travelling to a remote village to document Zaido, a 1,300-year-old annual ceremony. This village is where her father was born and lived in the north of Japan. Zaido, which dates from the Nara period (710 to 794), is also known as the “important dance day”. It starts on the second day of every new year, with the first rays of sun, the sacred ritual dancers (the noshu), young and old, wearing different masks and costumes from villages nearby, make their pilgrimage to perform the seven ritual dances in the hopes for good fortune for the coming New Year. Yukari Chikura’s personal journey documents an almost paradoxical set of values: the cultural variety of the communities that these pilgrims come from, as well as the unbreakable bond between the generations become the reason for the long survival of the ritual.