The fireworks over the Watarase River began in 1903, which makes them older than most things in the town of Ashikaga still in use. More than a century on, they remain the climax of the Ashikaga Summer Festival and one of the finest displays in the Kanto region, in both quality and sheer quantity.

Roughly twenty thousand shells go up over the riverbed on the first Saturday of August — great foot-wide shells, set-piece fireworks, wide starmines sweeping across the sky, and the famous large-caliber shells that Japanese pyrotechnics is known for, opening high above the water. Around half a million people come to watch.

What is generous about Ashikaga is the space. The wide floodplain of the Watarase is opened up almost entirely for free, so that the crowd spreads out along the banks and settles in on the grass, and there is room to simply lie back and look up. It is an old-fashioned kind of fireworks night — no elaborate ticketing for most of it, just a river, a town, and a summer sky.

For a hundred and twenty years the same thing has happened here at the start of August: the light rising off the Watarase, the whole town turned toward it. It is, for one evening, the brightest hour the river and the town will share all year.