ABOVE: "Stars” are at the heart of fireworks. They are created by applying layers of a black powder slurry—a combination of explosives and metals for color—in a rotating drum. Here, the stars are sifted at Abe Fireworks in Nagaoka, Japan, to ensure they are of uniform size.
You need a lot of space to build some of the world's largest fireworks. Which is why we're driving into Japan's countryside near Nagaoka, a city about 160 miles north of Tokyo. We pass two-story wooden houses, persimmon trees laden with bright orange fruit and rice fields, recently harvested. We know we're at Abe Industrial Fireworks when we spot the rows of mortars, some up to thirteen feet tall. They're used to fire three-foot-diameter round shells, so large and heavy that they have to be loaded into the cannons by crane. "In Japan every fireworks company knows Abe big shell," says Tomoki Abe, president of Abe Fireworks and the fourth generation running his family's more than century-old company.
But, as they say, size isn't everything. (Though in case you're comparing, the biggest shells launched in American shows are less than half the size of Abe's.) Fireworks makers in Japan pride themselves on symmetry and shells that explode into a perfect sphere of light. It's really this dazzling precision that has led me here.
In Hawaii we know fireworks, whether it's the weekly Friday night show at the Hilton Hawaiian Village or New Year's Eve, when neighborhoods around Oahu erupt with (illegal) aerials that make the streets resemble war zones. But one March five years ago, I glanced up at an unexpected show and saw delicate, glimmering bursts that scattered flashes in their wake like hundreds of fireflies; orbs that burned bright white and left long streaks like weeping willow branches; blooms of intense colors that changed hues in midair. They were the brightest and most beautiful fireworks I had ever seen. Where did they come from?
A shell is filled with stars of varying sizes at Abe Fireworks.
They were, I later discovered, part of the annual Honolulu Festival, a three-day span of cultural events in March that began in 1995 to foster relationships between Japan and the United States and has since expanded to include other Pacific Rim countries. Since 2012 the Nagaoka Fireworks Foundation has coordinated the fireworks show, the finale of the festival, sending fireworks from a few companies in the Niigata prefecture, including Abe. And so, a series of emails and a pandemic later, I am in Japan in late November, following the fireworks to their source.
When I arrived in Nagaoka by bullet train from Tokyo, I immediately spotted photos of fireworks in the train station and, upon exiting, saw a launching tube and replica shell suspended above it. "People in Nagaoka are deeply proud of the fireworks,'" says Ariko Tsuchida, my guide in Nagaoka, later that weekend. We have just visited the Nagaoka Fireworks Museum, which is next to a restaurant called High Ambition that projects fireworks across the walls, and a souvenir shop where bursts emblazon cookie boxes and sake bottles. And it being the holidays, in the city's Echigo Park, a Santa hat and angels adorn a model shell so large it looks like it could roll over and crush the meager Christmas tree next to it.
To learn about the city's fireworks, or hanabi in Japanese (literally "flower fire"), is to learn about a place three times destroyed. The first time in 1868, during the Japanese Civil War. Nagaoka was on the losing side and burnt to ash. Then, on August 1, 1945, an American air raid lasting two hours killed 1,486 people and annihilated most of the city. In 2004 an earthquake devastated the region. A timeline at the museum marks these tragedies, along with the hanabi created to commemorate them.
While Japan is known for its summer fireworks shows held across the country, there are also a few small festivals throughout the year, including the Winter Fantasy show in Nagaoka in November. Fireworks produced in Nagaoka are the stars of the show each March at Honolulu Festival.
While the city's first fireworks display dates back to 1879 for a Shinto shrine festival, it has since evolved with the city. The precursor to the modern-day show began in 1946, held exactly one year after Nagaoka's destruction. Since then, every August 1 at 10:30 p.m., the time of the air raid, three pure white fireworks are launched into the sky to remember the victims. Over the following two nights, during the Nagaoka Fireworks Festival—one of the largest shows in Japan—the display includes the Kome Hyappyo: one hundred shells fired in sequence to recall the one hundred sacks of rice donated to Nagaoka after the civil war. A municipal leader insisted they not be eaten, which would grant only temporary relief, and instead to sell the rice and use the funds to establish a school, an investment in future generations. And then there are the Phoenix fireworks, golden-winged efflorescences bursting over a mile-long stretch along the Shinano River. It's the longest span of fireworks in the world, a tradition that began one year after the catastrophic 2004 quake, as Nagaoka rose from the ashes.
"There's a huge difference between the perception of fireworks in the United States and Japan," says Katsuhiro Takano, a board member of the Nagaoka Fireworks Foundation. "Nagaoka's fireworks, as we repeatedly say, are dedicated to the deceased by the war and also the wish for eternal world peace. Those emotions are conveyed in our fireworks, but in the United States the fireworks are more like festive events. So we make a lot of efforts to have the understanding by the American side."
Honolulu is on the timeline, too: 2015, the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II, when the fireworks from Nagaoka included three white chrysanthemum hanabi launched at Pearl Harbor as prayers of everlasting peace. Honolulu and Nagaoka were once enemies: Isoroku Yamamoto, who commanded the attack on Pearl Harbor, was born in Nagaoka; just before Japan's surrender, Yamamoto and his hometown fell to the American military. To help reconcile the past, the two cities became sister cities in 2012, and ever since, the Nagaoka Fireworks Foundation has brought a show to the Honolulu Festival. Each year, it begins with the three shots of white fireworks to remember American and Japanese war victims, and the program always includes the signature Phoenix, symbolizing recovery and rebirth.
Japan is known for its spherical fireworks—fireworks made in Western countries tend to be cylindrical. Here, thirty-six-inch fireworks casings are made by applying fifty layers of paper.
"Usually my image of American fireworks-short time and then shoot many," Abe says in halting English, motioning with his hands to illustrate a multitude of bursts. "Here we shoot one by one. For me personally, I like to shoot one good shell. One big shell." For the Nagaoka Fireworks Festival, which takes place for two hours a day over two days, about twenty thousand hanabi are launched, whereas New York's July 4 fireworks, considered one of the biggest in the US, fires sixty thousand (much smaller) shells in just twenty-five minutes. And while during Nagaoka's show there are moments of frenzy like the Kome Hyappyo, much of the festival moves at a more measured pace, the better to fully appreciate dramatic and thunderous bursts like the sanshakudama, a three-foot-diameter shell that blooms to a span of more than two thousand feet—the height of Tokyo Skytree, the tallest tower in the world (and twice the height of the Eiffel Tower)—before cascading into a waterfall of light.
In Abe's office there's a photo of him at around three years old, as tall as the forty-eight-inch shell that debuted in 1986—it is still the largest commercially produced shell in the world, created by Masanori Honda in nearby Katakai. At one time Katakai and Nagaoka were so bent on beating each other to build the largest fireworks that the Japanese government limited the amount of gunpowder allowed in each city to eighty kilograms. Abe has not bested the forty-eight-inch shell, of which only a few are launched each year, but it's famous for making annually about twenty sanshakudama and eighty of the next size down, still impressive at two feet in diameter.
While a long tradition of fireworks exists across Japan stretching back to the sixteenth century, near large, dense cities like Tokyo, hanabi are limited to five inches. So it's in the countryside you'll find the producers of massive fireworks. But even the largest are still made by hand. The word "industrial" in the Abe company name belies its craft, down to the thick layers of paper in which the explosives are encased. The art of making fireworks in Japan begins with paper—if applied unevenly, the fireworks will not explode symmetrically. "The first job was making paper in my family," Abe says. "My great-grandfather made a special Japanese paper," one so durable that it could substitute for carpeting and, incidentally, was also sturdy enough for fireworks. "In Japan we have many shrines everywhere. So we would make paper and fireworks and share for shrine ceremonies. In the beginning it was just for hobby."
Tomoki Abe, president of Abe Fireworks, at age 3 next to the forty-eight-inch shell that debuted in 1986. It is still the largest commercially produced shell in the world.
Since then, though Japanese fireworks are rarely exported, Abe Fireworks has supplied and set off fireworks across the world, including in Afghanistan in 1958 to celebrate the country's independence and for the Olympics' closing ceremonies in Sydney and Salt Lake City. The day we visit, Abe is preparing to send fireworks to Hong Kong for a New Year's Eve celebration at Victoria Harbor. (This even though China is a huge manufacturer of fireworks—nearly all of America's fireworks are imported from China.) And of course, there are those he sends to the Honolulu Festival, though the largest shell is just eight inches due to regulations. But the fireworks mostly stay in Japan. Some make it into shows that Abe designs and shoots, and some are sold to other companies—though when it comes to launching the sanshakudama, "they feel scared," he says, and usually ask him to help.
Abe has made and set off fireworks his whole life: His family's house was next to the factory's previous location. After school he would play next door with fireworks. He remembers that up until about twenty years ago, they still lit all the hanabi by hand—by throwing the fire in the mortar and running. These days, the fuses are linked to a computer; you just press a single button to launch an entire sequence from a safer distance.
After high school Abe went to Canada to study English and intended to work at an American company to learn more about the industry, but then came the 9/11 attacks. As a result, "No foreigners could touch explosives," he says. "So I returned to Japan." When Nagaoka started launching fireworks in Honolulu in 2012, "basically, we cannot touch [the fireworks and equipment], just point."
A shell with stars and a bursting charge made of cork and rice husks.
A beautiful fusillade at Winter Fantasy.
The technicians try not to inhale the stardust. In the first set of rooms that Abe takes us through, they make "stars," applying layer upon layer of a black powder slurry in a rotating drum, like covering nuts with chocolate. Stars are at the heart of fireworks, and just like real ones, each is responsible for a point of light in the sky. The stars fill the spherical shells, and in a perfect firework they all illuminate at the same instant and all disappear together. They are a combination of explosives and metals, like barium for green or copper for blue, aluminum for flashes and magnesium for glittering white. "Japanese special skills is changing color," Abe says. To achieve this, different compounds are layered like in a jawbreaker candy—he shows me the cross section of a star that changes color seven times, and tells me of "ghost stars," which go dark before each color change. The current trend, Abe says, is blooms that change color directionally, which requires that a shell be filled with stars of six different types, each with six coats of color.
In the next rooms, where yellowing pieces of paper with formulas and notes are taped to the wall, the shell builders have swapped their outdoor shoes for soft slippers and sit at low tables split from a single large tree. Surrounded by wooden boxes of stars, stacks of shells and rounds of paper like coffee filters, they arrange stars in two halves of a shell. The pride of Japanese fireworks is the chrysanthemum, which bursts into a sphere that changes color as it expands. For this the stars are organized in a single layer in nested paper bowls, and between each layer is a bursting charge of gunpowder, cork and rice husks, which scatters the stars outward. In a chrysanthemum there can be as many as five concentric spheres to create an evenly spaced bloom, viewable from every direction. But there are also many other hanabi possibilities: stars arranged in a smiley face (always a crowd-pleaser); shells within a shell, which create many small fireworks going off at once; tubes within shells that will spin when ignited; half shells facing outward within a larger whole shell, which creates the wings of the phoenix; even stars individually outfitted with parachutes, to create drifts of light. When each half is finished, the shell builders—with a pause, a breath and steady hands—clap the two halves together to complete the ball. The finished ones line up by the doorway, their fuses and roundness making them look like cartoon bombs.
The final step is pasting together the shell. In one room the women—it's usually women who paste—sit cross-legged, gluing strips of paper over the smaller, filled shells. In the next room, papier-mache balls reach the women's waists as they make the thirty-six-inch casings, rolling and pasting, rolling and pasting. When the shells are finished, the paper will be fifty layers thick, almost as solid as wood. These large fireworks are filled with stars by cutting a hole in the top of the casing—two halves would be much too heavy to put together. (Though Teruaki Senuma, president of Ojiya Fireworks, whom Abe has invited over today, says he's tried. The stars, as expected, spilled everywhere.) A finished 36-inch sphere will weigh 440 pounds, as heavy as a tiger.
Tomoki Abe, the fourth generation of his family to run the century-old Abe Fireworks company, explains the process of making shells.
A worker at Abe Fireworks inspects two halves of a shell before pasting them together.
"Always, I feel nervous," says Abe. We are at the Winter Fantasy show, where his team and two other fireworks companies are running fuses to a control box in a van in the freezing rain. "A lot can go wrong with fireworks. We cannot test especially big one. It's very fun, but always when we shoot I feel nervous. I have no confidence." Sometimes the fireworks don't ignite. Sometimes the grass below them catches fire. (There are always firefighters close by.) Recently, Abe shot a thirty-six-inch shell that didn't reach its intended height of two thousand feet, exploding too early and just three hundred feet away from the mortar.
Luckily, no one was hurt.
Tonight, though, it's a relatively low-stakes program. Just six sequences, including one set to Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You," and, of course, the Phoenix. The largest shell is only five inches (there's a new structure in the park, and the city would prefer to keep it intact). And thanks to the rain, fires seem unlikely. Here, at Nagaoka's largest park, the setup feels spacious compared with the Honolulu show, which is crammed onto three seventy-five-foot barges off of Waikiki, with the pyrotechnicians separated from the igniting charges by only thick wooden boards.
A technician tests the “tail” of a firework—the streak you see as the firework shell ascends before it bursts. They are trying to create a four-second tail—four seconds between launch and explosion.
A display in Winter Fantasy in Nagaoka.
A number of pyrotechnicians around Japan have shown up for the show. You can tell the pyros because they're always smoking. (It's been said that they used to light the hanabi with their cigarettes.) One of them is George Tashiro, who used to be in finance. "Yeah, I wasn't happy being in that industry," he says, in between showing me photos of experimental shells he built and videos from his drones flying in the fireworks—he lost three last year when they flew too close to the explosions. About twenty years ago the bank he worked for had funded a company that went bankrupt, driving the company's founders to suicide. "It was bad. So when you're depressed, you want to look up, right?" Tashiro turned to fireworks. So too did the hundred or so spectators who came out for the Winter Fantasy despite the cold wind and rain. As the first firework streaks across the sky and we all look up in anticipation of the illumination, I think about what someone from the Nagaoka Fireworks Foundation said when I asked what drew him to hanabi. "That little line that goes up, and then it explodes," he said. "It looks like my life. A grand feeling."
