Katakai Fireworks

Katakai is a district of Ojiya with a few thousand residents, and every shell fired here was paid for by one of them. The fireworks are an offering to Asahara Shrine, bought by families to mark a birth, a wedding, a sixtieth birthday or a death, and the reason is read out over the loudspeakers before each one goes up. Both nights run from 19:30 to around 22:20, about fifteen thousand shells across the two. The one people travel for is the yon-shaku-dama, a shell roughly 120 centimetres across that opens some 800 metres wide over the hills. The association calls it the world's largest, and Katakai is the only place that sends one up every year. The town also holds the oldest record of a three-shaku-dama, four of them in 1891. The dates sat on 9 and 10 September for generations; since 2024 they follow the second Saturday of the month and the Friday before it.