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This evening just before dusk Echo and Kasumi and Kaya and I went down to Omimaiko (the red-pine-clad peninsula you can see to the northeast from our house) for the annual hanabi (fireworks; literally: flowerfire) festival. Omimaiko, sort of the 'riviera' of Lake Biwa, has been a summer resort night spot for centuries, as has much of the western coast of the Lake; all the daimyo and court folks and upper echelon samurai used to come here and hang out big time for the refreshing cool night summer air and the major entertainments of pre-electric times in the palpable absence of jet skis. Big companies still have their corporate resorts here and there, though the site has lost a bit of luster in the modern age, when it's been as easy to jet to Hawaii; still, the ambience here cannot be equaled elsewhere, except perhaps fauxly by Disney et al., when one day they do a diorama of Beautiful Old Japan. The place is still busy with boaters and swimmers and campers and fishermen, though, so it's crowded in summer, and when the fireworks festival is on, double or triple that. And going to a fireworks festival in Japan is like in the west going to a rock concert with a dedicated fan audience. Fireworks are integral to the social life of the Japanese, who are perhaps the world's greatest firework artists and connoisseurs. At falling dusk before the show, we lay on the peninsula's north shore beach with red pines behind us, the Lake in front spreading sapphire out toward the north and east, the mountains curving away on the west from south to north as the stars came trickling out in prelude to the local light cascade. When all was well into night, the fireworkers filled the sky with cherry blossoms, hearts, crysanthemums, all sorts of plumes and falls and bursts and torrents and rings and swirls of light, all to booms you could feel inside your ribs like a giant heart as the crowd roared its approval and Kaya's eyes grew wide and filled with flowers of brightness, till the manmade one-night light show ended its opening act for the shining silence of the big light show beyond, that spells out universes and gives meaning to always. We all returned home full of all the kinds of light there are.