Most Tanabata festivals in Japan are made of paper — streamers, wishes written on strips of colored card. The one in Yamaguchi is made of fire. On two nights at the start of August, the city fills with poles hung with countless crimson lanterns, and when they are lit the streets become rivers of warm red light.

The festival is said to date to the Muromachi period, begun by the Ouchi clan, the lords who made medieval Yamaguchi so cultured a city that it was called the Kyoto of the West. That would make this a Tanabata more than six hundred years old — a lantern festival wearing the name of the star festival, trading paper wishes for flame.

By day the poles stand bare, waiting. It is only after dark that the festival becomes itself. The lanterns are lit more or less at once, and the effect is of long avenues of soft red suddenly blooming out of the summer dark, the whole town threaded with color.

There is a tenderness to entrusting a wish to fire rather than to paper — something less permanent, more alive, gone by morning. You walk the lit streets on an early-August night, in the city the Ouchi built, and understand why the memory of this place, for so many who grew up here, glows red.