They are painted with flowers — peonies, chrysanthemums, the blossoms of seasons not yet arrived. Each February these Aizu lacquerware candles are placed throughout the castle town: at the base of Tsurugajo's stone walls, along the paths of the Oyakuen medicinal garden, at Iimori hill where the White Tiger Unit made its final stand in 1868. The flames are steadier than you expect in the winter air. Each candle burns in a glass holder, and the effect along the garden paths is of a second snowfall — slow, colored, rising rather than falling. The painted flowers are not decoration. They are a counterargument. Aizu carries particular weight in Japanese history. The city was on the losing side of the Meiji Restoration, and the gravity of those stories has not softened in a hundred and fifty years. The candle festival does not resolve this history. It simply says: beauty is also a form of persistence, and a city can hold both tragedy and loveliness at once.