Adventures in Japan

Monday, August 22

The Catch-Uppening Part One: Fireworkses

Summertime in this country is all about the fireworks. Well, it's also about drinking a lot and parades and stuff, but they sure do like their fireworks. It's not enough to just have some fireworks though, you need to have a festival (or matsuri) to go with it. Festival in this case means a bunch of stalls selling overpriced food and drink. Not nuts overpriced, but still. We went to see one of the bigger fireworks shows in the region, along the riverside in Osaka.

We ate some overpriced food. I got to fit as much fried chicken as I could into a paper cup! Damn my packing abilities! I felt a wee bit ill after that.

Did I leave the iron on?

Fireworks in Japan work a bit differently. They don't go all at once. You'll be walking along and then some fireworks will start going off. So you stop and watch. Then they end and you go, "Oh. That's it?" and you continue on your merry way and then some more fireworks go off. So you stop. And so on. No real flow or anything. Just random flashes of light and sporadic loud noises.

At least that's how it was at the first show we went to. The only show Carla went to, to be more precise. She was working on the next night of fireworks we wanted to see. Out by where David lives now there is this religious cult. This religious cult, every year, puts on one of the biggest fireworks in this country. Nutty.

And I don't say this solely to rub Carla's face in it, but the cult fireworks beat the pants off of the riverside fireworks. The name of the cult is Perfect Liberty Kyoden, PL for short. This is a picture of the cult's tower...

Is that not one of the most ungodly pieces of architecture you've ever seen? It looks less like a building than a Cthulu-esqe protuberance heralding its owner's imminent arrival and all our doom. Seriously, dude, that tower is hella bad mojo.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

David and I set off from his apartment about half an hour before the show was to start. We wanted to get a decent look at the show and neither of us were quite sure where said show was. We figured we'd just follow the flow of people. After half an hour of walking, the fireworks began. We couldn't really see them, there were buildings in the way, but we could hear them. Some of them sounded big. Damn big. We finally got a glimpse of the fireworks. They were very far away. The sound took a while to get to us. It still sounded big.

Walking towards the fireworks, I felt very odd. Like I was in that there War of the Worlds movie. Not the newfangled one, the old one. The purple and green one. If ya feel me. Cuz a lot of the fireworks were either purple or green. The fireworks sounded like small artillery (like I know how that sounds) and every once in a while we would see some explosions. They were very nice explosions. By the time we got as close as we were going to get we had been walking for about an hour. The streets were packed with people. The sound? Loud. Sound you feel in your chest. There had been so many fireworks that the air was thick with smoke. Some fireworks got lost within this cloud, illuminating it from within. Never seen that before.

There were a lot of fireworks. A LOT. You'd think I'd get bored. Nope. This was some grade A pyrotechnics. Yay crazy cult! I couldn't find out much of anything about the cult on the web. Man, I can figure out what you (yes you!) had for breakfast using the web, but this PL might as well not exist. I find that spooky, too.

Ninja Edit: Carla totally found some stuff on the web about the PL. She found their Canadian site even. Enjoy.

Enough words, more pictures.