Sapporo, Hokkaido

Snow sculptures are made knowing they will vanish in days. In February, giant sculptures rising more than ten meters line Sapporo's central park, temples, foreign landmarks, and figures from the year's news, all carved from nothing but snow and ice. Citizens, military teams, and international groups prepare for months and carve for days. The festival began in 1950, when local students built six snow statues in Odori Park. It has since grown into the largest winter event in the north, drawing millions of visitors from around the world. At night, lights play over the sculptures and projection mapping turns their white walls into screens for stories of light. And when the festival ends, everything melts away. People build these works fully aware that nothing will remain. One of Hokkaido's defining winter celebrations.

These are fireworks for a cool summer. Sapporo's warm season is brief, and that brevity makes it precious. Along the banks of the Toyohira River, four thousand shells rise into a northern night, watched by crowds in the kind of comfortable evening air that the rest of Japan can only envy.

The river runs through the heart of a major city, so the fireworks open against a backdrop of building lights, the urban glow and the bursting sky sharing the same frame. But the feel is entirely different from a festival in the humid south. Here the night is dry and clear, the air almost crisp, and you watch without the sweat and swelter that mark a Honshu summer.

There is a particular melancholy to fireworks in a place where summer does not last. The cool wind that makes the evening so pleasant is also a reminder—autumn is closer here, the warm days are counted, and the brief brilliant blooming of the fire mirrors the brief brilliant blooming of the season itself. You watch in the cool dark, and the beauty is touched, just slightly, with the knowledge that it is already ending.