Japan never lacks for festivals and events. Just when one is ending another one is getting ready to start the next weekend. One big thing is the many firework festivals that take place in the late summer.

You'd think that if you've seen one firework you've seen them all, which was my attitude before going, but that's not necessarily true here. Back home fireworks come in a variety of nice colours but are all basically the same 'flower' shape. Over here however, you can see various shapes like hearts, smiley faces, butterflies, saturns, as well as some poorly defined, famous cartoon character shapes which you kind of have to use your imagination a little in order to see. I didn't manage to get any of these shapes on film as they only last for a micro second or two before they are gone. However, every 10 minutes or so, they'd let off about a thousand fireworks at once, making it easy to capture some of the action.

Lots of fun, but an hour and a million and one fireworks later you're ready for something different. At least that's me. Japanese people are obviously fanatics about fireworks as evidenced by the unbelieable number of people watching. The particular event I went to is not one of the biggest, but damn, there were like a trillion people, all swarming around as far as the eye could see in any direction. Here's the view from my left.

And my right. Swarms of people to the edge of the horizon.

Here's the view in front of me. Yes, those are people across the river, crowding the riverbank on the other side. Why is it light out? We arrived a few hours before the show started. Obviously we weren't the only ones with this idea.

The train station itself was a nightmare, it took me 10 minutes just to get through the throngs and out the gate. Going home was worse. we waited for more than two hours after the show at a restaurant before we went back and the station was still crowded. Can't wait until next year so I can do it all again!

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