June arrives in Hiroshima wearing a yukata. The Toka-san festival — centered on Enko-ji Temple and spreading through the Nagarekawa district — is officially a summer fair. But it is also the city's collective signal: the first time each year that people take their cotton summer robes out of storage and step into the warm evening together. Around half a million people come over three days, making it the largest summer festival in the Chugoku region. The streets are closed to traffic. What strikes most visitors is not the scale but the quality of intention. People have dressed up. They have decided, individually and somehow collectively, to make this evening beautiful. Hiroshima carries its history with particular weight. The Toka-san is a reminder that it carries its summer too — with the same seriousness, the same grace, the same annual determination to begin again. Ten minutes from the Peace Memorial Park, the city loosens and becomes, for three June evenings, simply a place where people are glad to be.