Last night we grilled burgers and lit sparklers on the patio. Perhaps it was an unconscious nod to American Independence Day, though I didn’t think of that until just now. At the time it seemed perfectly Japanese.

Fireworks are legal in Tokyo (and all over Japan, as far as I know) and it’s really fun to light them off. The packaging all shows cartoon toddlers lighting them over open flames (at least on the packages of handheld fireworks) and since we don’t know exactly what any of them are, it’s always a bit of a mystery to discover what each one is going to do. The element of danger makes it even more fun.

Last night we had road flares on sticks. They were intensely bright—painful to look at—and burned from green to pink to yellow before dousing themselves. The people walking past our house probably thought we were nuts as we did not have the obligatory toddler lighting them. But then, we’re foreigners which makes us toddlers on our own, in a way. Posted by kuri at July 09, 2001 07:46 AM