Yukio Hashi -- Hanabi Ondo（花火音頭）

For all those folks in Canada, Happy Victoria Day! Most likely, there will be some fireworks display later on tonight. Japan has a huge swarm of fireworks festivals annually with one of the biggest being the Sumida River Fireworks Festival on a Saturday in late July.

Because I used to work at the Asakusa NOVA, I was literally less than 5 minutes away on foot from the Sumida River, and I remember on those Saturday nights when I was about to go off-shift, the neighbourhood would fill up with a flood of people numbering in the hundreds of thousands (perhaps as many as a million viewers). I was very fortunate one year because one of my students who lived in an apartment right by the Sumida invited a whole bunch of us over to get an up-close-and-personal look at the fireworks right from her place. Space is at a premium on street level and the heat and humidity don't make things any more comfortable although many of the spectators are in summer yukata mode. Therefore, having a friend with accommodations right by the river itself is worth its weight in gold, especially an apartment with good air conditioning.

I was surprised to find out that considering the long history of kayo and the even longer history of fireworks festivals in Japan that there hadn't been any particular festival song devoted to those annual summer starbursts. Well, perhaps a song does exist but if so, I haven't heard of it and it looks like veteran enka singer Yukio Hashi（橋幸夫）hadn't either.

In 2005, Hashi had recorded "Bon Dance"（盆ダンス）, a festival-themed enka to commemorate his 45th year in show business, and on realizing that there hadn't been a similar traditional tune to celebrate fireworks, he and prolific lyricist Toyohisa Araki（荒木とよひさ）set out to create "Hanabi Ondo" (Fireworks Folk Song) for release as his next single (his 172nd!) in November 2006. Itoyuki Hanayanagi（花柳糸之）, a leader of his own Japanese dance troupe, was put in charge of creating the actual dance, according to an article in the 2007 edition of the "Nikkan Gendai"（日刊現代）newspaper.

The November release struck me as being a bit odd considering the fireworks festival season was long over, but I gather that "Hanabi Ondo" was more than welcome in the summers of succeeding years at the various venues all over Japan.

I will always cherish my experience at my student's apartment that year. We ended up staying a few more hours at her place since the exodus of festival goers from Asakusa took a very long time by the subways and trains. I believe that I didn't get onto the Ginza Line until close to midnight and it was still fairly crowded...although no longer at physics-breaking levels.