Fire scatters over the Ise sea. Shirako, part of Suzuka in Mie, is a seaside town on Ise Bay—a place of craftsmen, famous for making the carved paper stencils used in traditional textile dyeing—and on its beach the summer fireworks rise. At the waterline of Tsuzumigaura beach, the light reflects across the surface of the bay, and somewhere beyond the dark water lies Ise, with its great shrine, the most sacred site in all of Shinto. The fireworks open over a coast steeped in the quiet old religion of Japan, the bay that has carried pilgrims toward the shrine for more than a thousand years. Suzuka is best known to the world for its racetrack, the famous circuit where Formula One cars scream around the corners. But this is the city's other face—not the roar of engines but the hush of the sea at night, the waves and the fireworks the only sounds. The summer over Ise Bay fades here gently, in the lap of water on sand and the soft percussion of shells, a calm and ancient coast seeing out another season.