Katakai Festival

Katakai is a small town in the hills above Ojiya, and for two nights every September it puts more into the sky than cities many times its size. The fireworks are an offering to Asahara Shrine, a custom traced back some four hundred years: every shell is paid for by a family, a company or a school year meeting again at twenty, forty-two or sixty, and the dedication behind it — a birth, a marriage, a person remembered — is read out over the town before it flies. Around 15,000 go up across the two evenings, from 19:30 to 22:20.

Katakai is where the three-shaku shell was born, and what brings people back is the four-shaku that follows it: at 22:00 on both nights, a shell about 120 centimetres across opens some 800 metres wide overhead, the largest launched anywhere in the world. Seven or eight of every ten shells here are ten-inch, sent up in two-, five- and ten-shot volleys, and the launch site sits directly behind the shrine with a hillside at its back. The hill returns the sound, so the burst lands on you a beat after the light — this is the mountain night of Niigata's three great displays, after the sea at Kashiwazaki in July and the river at Nagaoka in August.

The second day starts early: daytime fireworks run from 13:00 to 14:00 and finish with the only midday three-shaku shell in Japan, smoke and colour worked against daylight rather than dark. Through both days some thirty groups haul hand-built tamaokuri floats around the streets behind shagiri flutes and drums, and about 110 stalls line the shrine approach.

Between 180,000 and 200,000 people come to a town of a few thousand, so give the journey room: buses reach Katakai in about 20 minutes from JR Ojiya and 30 from JR Nagaoka, car parks run shuttles from 16:00, and the roads are closed and rerouted from early afternoon. Reserved sajiki boxes are sold in advance and sell out, and the association does not sell them overseas — the way in from abroad is the same-day ticket, ¥5,500 a person from 09:00 at the sajiki central entrance on both days. The fireworks go up in rain; only a typhoon or winds above 10 m/s postpones them, and then the two nights roll to later dates in the same order with tickets still valid.