JPNet ［●］ .Den in Japan: Fireworks show in Okazaki - Okazaki Hanabi Taikai (岡崎花火大会)

Fireworks show... One of many things everyone has heard about, but which one can never really see here in Czech Republic. Why? The hell I know why. It’s a shame, but if you expected to see those grandiose colourful explosions on your New Year trip to Prague, you’d be very disappointed. Provided there wasn’t a shot down airplane, that is… But it’s the exact opposite far in Japan and I’ll try to show how amazing a fireworks show can be and what can you witness every August in a “small” city of Okazaki in the Aichi Prefecture.

East Asia, or better said the eastern part of the globe, is actually quite famous for its fireworks. Like the ones in Sydney, Olympic Games shows in Beijing… And Japan is no exception. You can see some impressive fire blossoms bloom in the Japanese sky many times a year and all over the country. They simply blow something up all the time, but unlike running into dynamite suicide terrorists, which could provide kinda similar effect, it’s an event everyone seem to look forward to. You know, yet another opportunity to gather with family or friends, wear a yukata, waste some money on good food and overpriced drinks, hit at some girls and get numb drunk under a cherry tree. Life, sweet life…

Okazaki, even though it’s a relatively small city (355,000), produces about 70% of all Japanese fireworks and is therefore famous as the fireworks city. And of course, Okazaki too has its great hanabi taikai – the fireworks festival. It’s usually held on the first Saturday in August and people from all over the Aichi-ken, including nearby Nagoya (2,236,000…) gather in the vicinity of the Okazaki Castle to see what will explode this time. And since many, MANY people use trains to get there… Well, I haven’t ever seen so many people waiting for the same poor train on normally dead void station. The first time I thought something was weird was the moment I myself got on the train since every girl, every boy, all the women, all the men, every obaachan and every ojiisan (well, there weren’t any obaachans and ojiisans as far as I remember…) was wearing a yukata. And the usually empty train was 10 times as packed as I had ever seen so far on that line. Before I got on the train, I had been a little worried I may have a hard time finding the place as it was quite far from the station. Nope, I ended up being caught in the walking flow, so I didn’t even have to check the right route. What struck me as funny were some public servants walking in the middle of the crowd carrying “Please, don’t stop!” transparents to keep the flow organized. I got there an hour before the show started, but the place had already became crowded…even thought one ticket for a seat block by the riverbank costed 40000\ ($380 / 6000 Kč)!

Then, the show has finally begun and I was absorbed in watching beautiful shapes and colours it produced. Unfortunately, my camera is just a cheap digital compact, so I can’t show you any impressive pictures, but I took many videos as well, so feel free to watch them, too, they are a lot better than the lousy photos. ^^

After some 3 hours or so (yes, it lasted for 3 hours nonstop!) the show finally ended and everyone has started to pack and return home. I figured it’d be insane to wait and be trampled out by the enormous crowd moving to the train station, so I went back in first waves. The road looked like a battlefield, with burnt and torn peaces of giant exploded gunpowder containers literally all over the place. I wouldn’t want to clean up that post-apocalyptic mess.
Another weird thing I noticed: in the “Land of Vending Machines” (Japan…) where there are all the (un)imaginable types of vending machines everywhere and with sold-out drinks being as rare as catastrophic meteor fall, every beverage in every of dozens of vending machines was sold-out. Almost as if some wicked vending machine-fetishists had robbed out every single bottle and can to add to their “Drinks from Every Town in Japan” collection. Fortunately, I managed to buy a bottle in almost sold-out machine several kilometres from that place…
To top it in due course, the nighttime train station was utterly amazing. One could see nothing but people. Both platforms were totally full with people standing (at first) in four lines in front of every door mark, eventually overcrowding the place anyway with lunatic train attendants' organizing efforts put almost to waste. And this mass of bodies dressed in colourful yukata, almost like in a funny oldfashioned fairytale of sort, spread down to the ground level and far from the station. Even the Tokyo’s famous Scramble Crossing was nothing compared to this mass. But at last the train came and everybody packed themselves in like sardines in a tin-can and happily returned to home, sweet home...
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Overall, I loved it. ^^

Videos:

Sorry for the quality... YouTube has somehow reduced it significantly. =(