Fireworks!

On special summer nights, thousands of Japanese flock to open parks and roof-top vistas for dazzling aerial displays of copper oxide blues, Barium nitrate greens, and Strontium carbonate reds lighting the night skies.

Japanese tend to prefer round fireworks over the long showering types, in fact the Japanese word for firework, hanabi, literally means fire flower. While sheer power of the concussion waves nonetheless delights the crowd, it is how a firework blooms that is important to Japanese. The perfect firework opens into a chrysanthemum or peony. The round shell firework warimono is packed with multiple layers and so produces multiple colors, much as a flower will have petals of one color and stamina of a different.

So popular are fireworks that travel agencies have you covered for firework tour packages.

According to the Guinness Book of Records:

The largest firework ever produced was Universe I Part II, exploded for the Lake Toya Festival, Hokkaido, Japan on 15 Jul 1988. The 1,543 pound shell was 54.7 inches in diameter and burst to a diameter of 3,937 feet.

Note that an American mile is 5,280 so this single shell is 3/4 of a mile across!

Check out a Japanese fireworks show today!