A summer treat postponed

Boom boom boom. Buy food and drinks, grab a room.

We got word that an approaching typhoon will postpone our annual fireworks festival. No word yet on the new date.

Well, given this bone-dry summer I’ll happily take the typhoon. More joy, believe me, will result from lashes of rain than from sulphur smoke in our hot night sky.

The delay of our fireworks show got me thinking about the meaning and the history of these displays in Japan. First, Japanese call the shows hanabi taikai, which translates to fireworks competition. This is important because in most big cities a show will involve two teams—maybe located 5 kilometers apart so you can discern the difference in the night sky—competing in turns to outdo one another. Crowds cheer for their favorite team, and from my own experience, everyone walks away from the evening once the smoke has cleared with a strong feeling of who the night’s winner was.

The first fireworks show in Japan is said to have happened in 1733. The Tokugawa Shogun ordered the display after a terrible cholera outbreak had occurred in Edo as a way to mark the lives of the tens of thousands who died. Importantly, he decreed that the fireworks were also intended to celebrate survivors’ lives.

Japanese readily admit that fireworks were yet another thing bestowed on this country by China. “The Chinese pioneered fireworks. We refined them,” they say.

And I believe that spin. Japanese shows are massive, precise, and endlessly inventive. You’ll see everything from traditional rockets and starbursts to that year’s cultural and pop phenomena depicted in mile-high night illustrations. Just the other day an 8-year old told me that this year’s Pokemon “Something or other chan” stared down at her from the Tokyo sky a few weeks ago. She was thrilled.

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During the Covid pandemic, fireworks shows were of course canceled across the country. There was simply too much worry about causing cluster infections, as indeed Japanese throng ridiculously for these events. (I think now that we understand Covid transmission a lot better, the shows could have resumed sooner than this year…but hey, 20/20 hindsight and all that.)

I remember several pop-up shows happening during the emergency though. No announcements would be made about dates, locations, or times—thus preventing anyone from throng’ing—but suddenly amazing displays of fireworks would appear over a piece of the city. The boom, boom, booms could be heard for miles, and families and friends rushed to any clearing they could find to get a glimpse.

Thinking back to Tokugawa, the shows again marked those lost as well as us survivors shouldering on. People said at the time, like with the spontaneous aerial shows over major cities by Japanese Self-Defense Force jets, “It’s aimed at cheering us all up.”

And it worked for at least for a while each time, as city residents cooed about the show for a week or so after the displays.

Postponement of our peninsula town’s fireworks shouldn’t be much of a challenge. I learned years ago that small beachside cities like ours are typically “stops” along a pre-determined coastal route for sailing fireworks show providers who shoot rockets from their anchored boats and pontoons. The producers contract for, let’s say, 10 cities up and down a given coast line, and then do a show a night at each town.

It’s pretty genius if you ask me, as each tiny town is able to have its “own” show together with the night of revelry and boosted food, drink, and entertainment sales that come along with it. The next morning, the boats quietly clean up, re-organize, and pull up anchor for the sail down to the next cove on their schedule. I’m sure our crew can find a way to revisit later this month.

I think I mentioned several times that we were all excited about our town’s matsuri festival coming back this year. Well, it came and went, but not with Toru and me. Our town’s matsuri was scheduled for a Wednesday night—and I had to be in Tokyo. I asked Saitoh Ku-cho recently what’s up with scheduling a matsuri for a Wednesday night. “Ah, it’s not Wednesday per se,” he said. “Our festival is always on the 19th of July and this year that happened to fall on a Wednesday.” So I guess the upshot is next year I take the day off to attend on whatever weekday July 19 is, or wait several years for a Friday or Saturday to roll around. These guys.

Let’s just hope that when fireworks come around again for the re-visit it’s not on a Tuesday.