It begins before you are ready. In the first five seconds, a thousand shells erupt at once—an opening so audacious that people return year after year just to be ambushed by it. The Edogawa does not ease you into the evening. It seizes you. The river here marks a border, and on the far bank the city of Ichikawa launches its own display at the same moment, so that the two prefectures become, for one night, a single field of light. More than a million people gather along both shores. They come from the dense low neighborhoods of eastern Tokyo, the shitamachi, where summer has always meant festivals and shaved ice and the press of bodies in the heat. Eight themes move across the sky, each set to music—Mount Fuji rendered in sparks, a diamond suspended above the water. There is something democratic about it, this enormous free gift to a working-class quarter of the city. No tickets, no hierarchy of seats that matter. Just the riverbank, the crowd, and the oldest pleasure a city can offer: to stand together in the dark and watch the sky catch fire.