On a quiet February morning in 1943, a Mexican farmer named Dionisio Pulido was tending to his cornfield in the village of San Juan Parangaricutiro. The sun was rising, the soil smelled of earth and ash, and the world seemed as ordinary as ever. Until, quite literally, it cracked open beneath his feet.

In the heart of Nagano, where winter drapes the land in quiet white, lies a lake that carries a divine footprint—or at least, that’s what generations of believers have whispered. Every January or February, when the surface of Lake Suwa freezes just right, something extraordinary happens. Great cracks zigzag across the ice, rising like a frozen wave from shore to shore.