Here a man holds the fireworks in his arms. The tezutsu is a hand-held firework—gunpowder packed into a length of bamboo, lit, and clutched against the body as a column of fire roars upward and a cascade of sparks rains down over the man who holds it. Toyohashi is where this tradition was born. It happens at the Gion festival of Yoshida Shrine. The pillar of flame leaps many times a man's height, and in its glare you can see the face of the one holding it—calm, fixed, enduring the heat and the sparks pouring down around him. It is not a spectacle watched from a safe distance. It is fire embraced, deliberately, by a human being standing in its center. This is not a festival of shells bursting in a far-off sky. It is something older and more visceral—the body itself placed against the fire, courage made visible in the willingness to hold what burns. Sparks, pride, and nerve. The tezutsu is fireworks brought down to earth and into a man's own arms, and to watch it is to feel the old danger that all our prettier displays have learned to keep at a distance.