Fireworks

The Japanese summer has a plenty of hanabi festivals. Hanabi is the Japanese word for fireworks and literally means fiery flower. These are very popular and therefore the banks of the rivers or lake where they take place get filled with millions of people. For my first one, 7 years ago, I remembers swarms of people so big that it looked like a river - quite scary. Stampede risk runs high, yet this being the Japanese you can still trust order will be kept. So I went again.

Another problem with so many people is that in a high-rise cityscape, you might not get a very nice view - there are so many people standing that you can not go everywhere you please. This year, the organizers had a good idea: they were marching us in waves along the river so that everyone had a chance to look at the view, for a short period of time. Here is a video, where you can see the best view I had, the amount of people in my wave and the police pushing us so that the next wave could see.

It was really hot yesterday, and being pressed against so many people made things worse. You all know that penguins press against each other in order to keep warm. I never thought it would be very efficient. In fact, it is: just standing in a crowd like this gave me the feeling of being inside a burning box. As soon as we started walking and the crowd thinned, temperatures became bearable again.

At the end of the fireworks, people walk away - and it takes a lot of time to evacuate such a big amount of individuals. The best technique is to walk to stations further away so as to avoid being squeezed in a train at full capacity. I am impressed at the order and the organization, in every other country this would be very risky. Because there are so many people in a relatively small area, cells get overloaded by requests from mobile phone - as if it was the first of January! We ended up in a restaurant further away. Demand drives the prices really high in the firework area, 300€ for a normal diner!