The Thud Before the Light
The first shell of the night is always a letdown. It goes up around 7:30, a plain red circle, and you think — okay, I sat in 35-degree heat for four hours for this? Then the third round starts. A chrysanthemum the color of old gold opens over the river, and the whole crowd goes quiet for about half a second before someone near you whispers kirei.
That half-second is the thing. Tens of thousands of people holding their breath at the same time.
Japan’s fireworks season runs from late July into early September. The Japanese Wikipedia article on hanabi taikai lists well over 200 events, and that’s probably missing the hyperlocal ones that only get announced on town hall websites a few weeks out. The 2026 season should start around July 20 and wind down in the first week of September. Here’s what I’d actually recommend paying attention to.
Five Worth Traveling For
Sumida River, Tokyo — Late July, usually the last Saturday. Going since 1733, which makes it the oldest continuously held hanabi in Japan. The crowd is staggering — close to a million people along both banks of a fairly narrow river. You feel the bass thump in your chest.
The ground-level viewing experience is honestly not great unless you show up absurdly early. People start claiming spots with blue tarps at noon. A better move is booking a rooftop table in Asakusa — shells bursting next to Tokyo Skytree is a scale thing you can’t get from the riverbank. Expensive, but you skip the three-hour wait.
Omagari National Competition, Akita — Fourth Saturday of August. This one is different because it’s a competition, not a show. Pyrotechnicians from across Japan enter their best single shell. Judges score on symmetry, roundness, and something called kie — how beautifully the shell fades. The quality gap between a regular festival and Omagari is immediately obvious, even to a casual viewer.
Getting there is about three hours by Komachi shinkansen from Tokyo. The town has essentially no hotel capacity relative to demand — book several months ahead or be prepared to stay somewhere an hour away.
Nagaoka, Niigata — Around August 2-3. Opens with a single white chrysanthemum launched in silence — a memorial for the 1945 bombing that destroyed the city. What follows is two hours of genuinely ambitious pyrotechnics. The sanjakudama triple shells bloom to something like 650 meters across. I’ve read descriptions comparing it to being inside the firework rather than watching it, and that sounds about right based on the videos I’ve seen.
Lake Biwa, Shiga — Early August. Ten thousand shells over Japan’s largest lake. The reflections are so sharp you genuinely lose your sense of up and down. The main viewing area along the Otsu waterfront packs out early, but the east shore is quieter and some people swear the angle is better.
Miyajima, Hiroshima — Traditionally mid-August, though the exact date has moved around recently, so verify before booking anything. Fireworks launched from boats near Itsukushima Shrine’s floating torii gate. When the light catches that vermillion gate it’s extremely photogenic. The catch is the ferry situation — the island is tiny and the last boats fill up fast. (I’d honestly confirm the 2026 schedule closer to the date — this one has been inconsistent.)
The Small Ones Nobody Writes About
Kumano in Mie Prefecture shoots shells off sea cliffs. The sound ricochets off rock walls in a way that no urban venue can match. Osaka’s Tenjin Matsuri pairs fireworks with illuminated boats on the Okawa River — the fireworks are secondary to the festival itself, but the combined sensory experience is a lot.
Then there are the ones that don’t appear in any English-language guide. Fishing villages along Shikoku’s coast, river towns in Tohoku, places that do maybe 500 shells in 20 minutes. No reserved seating, no crowd management, no tourist infrastructure at all. You bring a blanket and a convenience store bento and that’s the whole setup.
I haven’t been to most of these, to be honest. A friend who lives in Akita has told me about a few, and the appeal seems to be the intimacy — fifty people on a hillside instead of a million on a riverbank.
Heat, Trains, and Hotels
Late July Japan is brutal. Not warm-evening-pleasant, but genuinely oppressive — the kind of humid where your camera lens fogs the instant you exit an air-conditioned train. Bring a folding fan. Bring a tenugui towel. Drink water constantly, more than you think you need.
If you’re doing more than one festival, a JR Pass makes financial sense. The Omagari round trip alone is around ¥16,000. I bought my exchange voucher through KLOOK before flying — swapped it for the actual pass at the station in about ten minutes. Probably not the absolute cheapest option, but having it sorted before landing saved me some mental overhead.
Accommodation is genuinely the hardest part. Festival weekends near major venues book up three or four months out. The strategy that works is staying one or two stops away by local train — you trade a short ride for dramatically lower prices and rooms that actually exist. For Sumida River specifically, look at Yanaka or Ueno-area budget places rather than competing for Asakusa inventory. Rakuten Travel is useful for finding smaller ryokan and Japanese-style inns that don’t show up on the international booking platforms.
Costs: the fireworks are free. You’re paying for transport, a hotel room, and festival food. What that adds up to depends entirely on how you travel and where you sleep. Just the shinkansen to Omagari and back plus one night in a budget hotel is going to run ¥25,000 or so. Stay somewhere fancier or add extra days and it climbs from there. Hard to give a meaningful range.
Yakisoba, Yukata, and the Quiet Moments
Every major hanabi has a corridor of yatai stalls leading to the venue. Iron griddles sizzling with yakisoba, shaved ice in colors that don’t exist in nature, takoyaki being flipped with a precision that looks surgical. The charcoal-and-soy-sauce smell hits you before you see anything. Getting there by 3 PM means hot food is still available; by 7, several stalls have sold out.
Yukata: you’ll see a lot of people wearing them, locals included. If you want to try, rental shops near festival areas will dress you and handle the obi knot — highly recommended, because that knot is not something you figure out from a YouTube tutorial. Not really.
Something I keep thinking about: during the best shells, the crowd goes silent. Not polite-quiet, but genuinely silent. Then a murmur — kirei, or occasionally tamaya, which traces back to Edo-period fireworks house rivalries. I’ve read that shouting tamaya was common centuries ago but is mostly gone now. You hear it once in a while from older spectators.
What Makes Japanese Fireworks Different
The short version: Japanese shells are designed to open into perfect spheres. Most other countries’ fireworks burst irregularly because the star pellets aren’t arranged with the same precision. Japanese craftsmen pack each pellet by hand into concentric layers — the technique is called warimono — so the shell expands evenly in every direction.
Colors come from metal compounds in the star pellets. The specific chemistry is apparently closely guarded by each pyrotechnician’s workshop, but broadly, reds involve strontium, greens involve barium, and blue is supposedly the hardest color to get right. Advanced shells change color as they expand — the term is kawari — cycling through two or three hues before fading. That’s a simplification, obviously, and the actual chemistry is considerably more complex.
The largest shells — yonshakudama, about 120 cm across — bloom to roughly 800 meters in diameter. I haven’t stood directly underneath one. I’ve stood moderately close, and for four or five seconds your entire field of vision is light.
Getting Out
Every hanabi ends the same way: everybody walks toward the same train station through the same narrow streets. Gunpowder and grilled corn in the air. Kids asleep on parents’ shoulders, clutching dead sparklers. Cell signal is basically gone for about 30 minutes — save your route offline beforehand.
Last time I did Sumida River, I got back to the hotel around midnight. The geta sandals had given me blisters, my nose was sunburned from the afternoon wait, and every single photo on my phone was blurry — turns out you can’t hold a camera steady while looking straight up. But the thing I remember from falling asleep that night was the afterimages. Eyes closed, and these chrysanthemum shapes kept pulsing on the inside of my eyelids. Probably just retinal fatigue. Took a while to stop.
