This is the summer when the great serpent breathes fire. Omuta in Fukuoka was once a coal-mining town, one of the engines of Japan's industrial rise, and the star of its summer festival is the Daijayama—an enormous serpent float that spits sparks from its open mouth as it is hauled through the streets. The fireworks color this festival, opening over a city built on coal, watched by the descendants of the miners who powered a nation. There is a working-class pride woven through it, the sweat-and-dignity character of a place that did hard, essential labor for the whole country and has not forgotten it. Two fires light the town. The sparks pouring from the serpent's mouth as it moves through the crowd, and the shells bursting overhead. Omuta's mines are mostly closed now, the great industrial age that made it has passed, but each summer the town still lights its fires—the fire-breathing serpent in the streets and the fireworks in the sky—a city that fueled Japan insisting, with flame, that it is still here.