Shizuoka City has a problem. Mount Fuji is an hour east, a decent beach is an hour west. Outside of green tea and clean air, Shizuoka City itself doesn't have much going for it.

Thank You Tetsuka (above right) and Strange Fruit perform in Shizuoka's Diadogei World Cup street performance competition.

This makes the Daidogei World Cup street performance competition all the more unusual: It just isn't very Shizuoka-like. Nonetheless, for the first four days of each November an amazing transformation takes place: A bizarre army of jugglers, magicians, pantomimes, musicians, conceptual artists and clowns converge from all over the world, and conservative, dowdy, dull Shizuokans call in sick, get drunk in public, throw money around, talk back to the performers and sometimes even perform themselves.

By any measure the Daidogei is a huge event. Last year there were 54 acts doing their performance in 30-minute intervals at 25 locations. Over 1.5 million people attended, three times Shizuoka's actual population.

"It was never supposed to happen this way," an executive committee big shot explained to me over a late-night whiskey. I don't think he was very unhappy about it, though, since performers and friends filled his chic little downtown bar to the rafters every night of the festival. His good friend, also on the executive committee, happens to own the design studio that does the festival pamphlets and posters. Behind the festival curtain, Shizuoka is that kind of place.

The collision of unexpected success, big-show ambition and small-town mentality isn't easy on the performers, however. As one American performer fumed at me while packing up his fire sticks after his session with the judges, "This isn't a contest, it's a crap shoot." But that isn't really the fault of the "judges": a mishmash of regular Shizuoka citizens including grandmas, housewives, salarymen and school kids. Cute but not very professional.

But just how are you supposed to judge a street performance anyway?

The performers range from artistic to outrageous to Las Vegas showbiz schmaltz. One of the most artistic is Strange Fruit, an Australian stilt act in which the four performers stand on fixed but flexible poles, bending back and forth like slow-motion flowers in the breeze.

"It's actually a nine-person, 40-minute show, but we cut it down for this festival," said Roderick Poole, the artistic director, on the first day. "The act tells a story about life, love and death.

". . . but they're still not sure what it's about," he said about the Shizuoka reception.

Shizuoka got it, however, and gave Strange Fruit a well-deserved second-place silver medal. They will be back this November slugging it out for the gold with 55 other acts.

Lots of performers think there shouldn't be any competition at all, naturally, but if there wasn't that 2 million yen prize the greed principle wouldn't push everybody. Still, it is more than that.

For many, if not all the performers, what it comes down to isn't competition or money. It is that indescribable, intangible magic moment when performer and audience open up to each other and something incredible happens. One person rises above indifference, fear, even pride, to give a gift of simple joy, and the audience rises to follow the performer to a place where it's never been before.

"After a show like that, I feel like Superman," a performer told me. It's the reason they do it at all, and it's the reason this festival goes on year after year.

The Japanese performers just keep getting better and better too. When the festival started in 1992, Taro Yuki and his "Living Museum of Art" pantomime, which included dead-on poses of the "Mona Lisa" and "Venus de Milo," was the only native performer whose talent was undeniable. He won the World Cup.

There are a dozen young, restless performers with talent to burn, like Thank You Tetsuka, whom you might have seen in front of Shinjuku Isetan on a Sunday afternoon, jumping hurdles in pantomime to show his undying love for a kewpie doll.

Thank You won the world competition last year, having won the Japan Cup division the year before that. His quick rise left some performers dubious of the judge's decision: During the award ceremony the Spanish Mambo Brothers backstage kept holding their noses saying "tadeo."

"What does that mean?" I asked. "You know, when the fish smell bad," said the tall one in slow English. "Oh, you mean fishy." "Right, tadeo."

I walked back to the dressing room where Thank You's friend and colleague Akira Tsuruoka was packing up his gear. Last year I saw him crying in the stage wings when Thank You won his prize, now he just shook his head. "It's strange . . . I should be feeling something but I don't."

Thank You walked in after getting his reward. He looked at me, shrugged with his big round eyes and said, "I don't know . . ."

"It's Shizuoka, man, what do you expect," I said. At least it wasn't as bad as four years ago, when a mediocre magician lounge act won because the pretty blonde assistant had a shapely chest and the judges were middle-aged salarymen.

"Just take it as a compliment," I said and thought, "Just take the money and run."