Japan shoots its fireworks in summer — tens of millions of people, yukata, humidity, haze. Nagano waits until November 23. The Ebisuko Fireworks Festival, running since 1899, is the country's great cold-weather hanabi: some ten thousand shells over the Sai River on Labor Thanksgiving Day, in air so dry and clean that pyrotechnicians will tell you, quietly, that this is the season fireworks actually look their best. Smoke clears instantly. Edges stay sharp. A chrysanthemum shell in late-autumn air is a different object than the same shell in August.

The date is no accident. The festival grew out of the Ebisuko fair of Nagano's Nishinomiya shrine, when merchants prayed for prosperity and farmers, harvest done, came to town for winter provisions; the fireworks began as commercial fanfare over the year-end sales. It remains a merchants' festival at heart, now anchored by two celebrated local houses — Beniya Aoki and Shinshu Enka — whose music-synchronized starmines and ten-inch shells draw serious fireworks pilgrims from across Japan.

Logistics are blunt: the riverside site is about thirty minutes' walk (or a shuttle ride) from Nagano Station, the show runs 6:00 to 7:30 pm, and the cold is genuine — down jacket, gloves, something hot in a thermos. Shivering slightly while a shakudama blooms overhead in crystalline air is, once experienced, hard to give up for summer.