The sky disappears. At the Shonan Hiratsuka Tanabata, the shopping streets are buried under enormous bamboo decorations, the largest of them ten meters tall, streamers of every color swaying overhead until you can no longer see the sky above you. The festival began after the war, as part of the town's recovery. A place rising from burnt ground wanted people to come, and so it competed in spectacle, hanging its streets with the most extravagant decorations it could make. It wanted, simply, to be lively again. The old custom underneath it is small and familiar: you write a wish on a paper strip and tie it to bamboo, the thing every Japanese child does once. Here that quiet gesture is scaled to the size of a whole town. When the wind blows, the decorations rustle—a dry whisper of paper and plastic, hundreds of them moving at once—and you look up into a flood of color while the crowd flows on beneath. The start of summer on the Shonan coast.