Fireworks in Japan are usually a gift to the crowd. In Ise, they are a gift to the gods. This is one of the country's three great competitive fireworks displays, held on the banks of the Miyagawa River near the Grand Shrine of Ise, and the fireworks here are offered as an act of dedication — launched toward the sky above one of Shinto's most sacred sites.

It began in 1953, to mark a rebuilding of the shrine, and it has kept its competitive form ever since. Pyrotechnicians come from across Japan to enter in two categories — single shells and starmines — and they are judged, and ranked. These are not fireworks meant simply to please. Each maker brings the shell they are proudest of, and stakes their reputation on it.

Because it falls relatively early in the summer, before most of the season's displays, it has become something else for the fireworks makers themselves: a prayer for safety in the year's work ahead. The first sky of the season, in a sense — the one against which the rest will be measured.

So there is a doubled seriousness to a night in mid-July on the Miyagawa. The crowd sees competition, technique, the finest shells in the country opening over the water. But the setting insists on the older meaning. Near the boundary of the sacred, the flowers of fire bloom and fade, and skill and prayer, for a few hours, become the same act.