Festivals

Japan has over a thousand fireworks festivals every summer. Most of them are lovely: a warm evening, a river or bay, forty minutes of colour overhead, and everyone cycling home before ten. But a handful of Japanese hanabi events are something categorically different — events where the scale is genuinely overwhelming, the artistry is competitive and taken seriously as a craft, and the crowd of hundreds of thousands of people creates a collective experience that you simply can’t replicate anywhere else. ...