This is the herald of the Yosakoi. Kochi—the old province of Tosa—is the home of the Yosakoi festival, where dancers clack handheld wooden naruko clappers as they move through the streets in vast, exuberant teams. And the fireworks announce the opening of its summer, the Tosa night sky bursting open above the Kagami River. This is the sky Sakamoto Ryoma knew—the restless young samurai from Tosa who helped overturn the old shogunate and dreamed of a modern Japan before he was cut down at thirty-one. The summer sky here is wide and open, almost oceanic, befitting a province that always faced outward toward the Pacific and the wider world beyond it. After the fireworks, the frenzy of the Yosakoi begins, the clatter of the naruko spilling through every street. There is a quality to Tosa people the rest of Japan recognizes instantly—open, headlong, warm, a little wild. Their summer is cheerful and direct and loud, and the fireworks that begin it carry that same bright unguarded energy up into the southern dark.