Hiroshima, Hiroshima

June arrives in Hiroshima wearing a yukata. The Toka-san festival — centered on Enko-ji Temple and spreading through the Nagarekawa district — is officially a summer fair. But it is also the city's collective signal: the first time each year that people take their cotton summer robes out of storage and step into the warm evening together.

Around half a million people come over three days, making it the largest summer festival in the Chugoku region. The streets are closed to traffic. What strikes most visitors is not the scale but the quality of intention. People have dressed up. They have decided, individually and somehow collectively, to make this evening beautiful.

Hiroshima carries its history with particular weight. The Toka-san is a reminder that it carries its summer too — with the same seriousness, the same grace, the same annual determination to begin again. Ten minutes from the Peace Memorial Park, the city loosens and becomes, for three June evenings, simply a place where people are glad to be.

The market runs along the Motoyasu River, within sight of the Atomic Bomb Dome. This proximity is not ironic; it is simply how cities work — life continuing in the places where it was interrupted. Young Hiroshima designers, vintage dealers, makers of small objects. The market is unremarkable in the best sense: a normal thing happening in a city that has had to work hard to be normal again.

The flea market appears monthly, announced through local channels, attended mainly by people who already know about it. The mix is characteristic of a certain kind of Japanese city market: old furniture alongside handmade ceramics alongside secondhand clothing alongside things that resist easy categorization. The vendors know each other. The regulars know the vendors.

Hiroshima is usually visited for one reason. The morning market along the Motoyasu River is a reason to stay one day longer — to see the city as a place where young people are making things and selling them to each other on a weekend morning, beside a river that has been flowing past this spot for longer than the Peace Memorial has existed.