Fireworks

In Japan, summer is just not summer without fireworks (hanabi).

Hanabi range from hand-held sparklers lit in the yard on a summer evening to major fireworks displays (hanabi taikai), like the annual events over the Sumida River and Tokyo Bay, for which everything else stops and it seems as if all of Tokyo has turned out to watch. Hanabi taikai don't commemorate anything in particular -- except people's desire to see fireworks in the summertime -- and there are usually several big fireworks displays in each city throughout the summer. As with summer festivals, like O-bon or the Gion Matsuri in Kyoto, a hanabi taikai is an excuse to wear traditional Japanese clothing. Most young women wear a yukata, a colorful lightweight cotton kimono, and young men wear yukata or jimbei, which are basically a short-sleeved, short-legged karate suit. Women wear geta (wooden sandals) and men wear geta or zori, which are the ancestor of the flip-flop. If you get on the subway and notice all the young people dressed in yukatas and jimbei, it's a pretty safe bet that there's a fireworks display going on somewhere nearby.

I have many good memories of watching fireworks in Japan. Some of the best involved boarding a fishing scow from a loading dock in Yokohama with two dozen other customers of the Bus Bar (a mobile bar in an old bus, now parked on a Yokohama loading dock, which will be the subject of a future post) and motoring out past the Yokohama Bay Bridge and into Yokohama Harbor to see the fireworks over the towers of the Yokohama's Minato Mirai.

But perhaps my most memorable hanabi taikai was the one some friends and I put on ourselves, from my rooftop balcony, on July 4, 1993.

July 4 was a Sunday, and I had invited Dave S. (Meishi Man) and his girlfriend, Chieko, over to my house for a barbecue. As was the custom, I supplied the yakitori and did the cooking, and they supplied the beer and the company. That day, in addition to beer, Dave also brought what can only be described as an arsenal of fireworks, which he had purchased at the 7-11.

Growing up in New Jersey, fireworks were illegal. Occasionally, a friend would acquire some illegal firecrackers in Chinatown. Sometimes, friends with relatives in the South would return home with more exotic fireworks that they had purchased in Washington, D.C., where fireworks were legal. But, in general, fireworks were hard to come by when I was a kid. Imagine my surprise and delight when I saw, during my first summer in Japan, that every convenience store sells extensive supplies of ordnance ranging from sparklers to bottle rockets to streamers to tank-buster bombs. On July 4, 1993, Meishi Man showed up at my house with the biggest package of fireworks I had ever seen: a 3,000 -yen jumbo pack of explosive delights.

By the time it had gotten dark enough for fireworks, we'd been barbecuing and drinking beer for hours. Blowing stuff up on my balcony and launching bottle rockets all over the neighborhood seemed like a really excellent idea. We figured that fireworks were normal in the summertime and that no one would complain. After fifteen minutes of shelling, however, my next-door neighbor leaned out her window and complained that we were scaring her dog. So, we decided to pack up our weaponry and head to Yoyogi Park, a large green space in the middle of Tokyo, a few blocks away from my place. We stopped at 7-11 for more beer and more bombs before making our way to the park.

We were a bit apprehensive about being stopped by the police for launching fireworks in the park. Japanese cops were always looking for reasons to bust gaijin, and Meishi Man had nearly been arrested once when pushing home a bicycle he had fished out of a river and planned to refurbish. But the beer gave us courage, and we really, really wanted to continue blowing things up. We made our way to Yoyogi Park's central meadow -- the place I had first met Meishi Man the previous November at the Yale-Yale touch football game won by Harvard. As we scanned the darkness for signs of something or someone that might halt our revelry, what we saw surprised us: the unmistakable lights of a half-dozen other mini hanabi-taikai scattered around the meadow. Fireworks in the park were just a rite of summer. No one would stop us from exploding the rest of our arsenal.

In the relative cool of the summer night, we drank our beer and, one after another, touched cigarette lighter to fuse and launched bottle rockets and streamers into the Tokyo night.