Nagaoka was bombed on the night of 1 August 1945 and some 1,500 people died. The fireworks on 2 and 3 August are explicitly a memorial: the display opens with white shells fired at the hour of the raid, and its signature piece, the Phoenix, is a two-kilometre wall of fire along the Shinano river set to music, created after the 2004 earthquake.
Around twenty thousand shells are fired over the two evenings, including a shell nearly a metre across that opens to 650 metres.
No attendance figure is collected in this pass.
The date is fixed by the anniversary and will not move. It is counted among the three greatest firework displays in Japan, and it is the one where the crowd is quiet at the start.
PlanningFixed on 2–3 August — the anniversary of the 1945 bombing, which is why the date does not move.
Dates
computed from the rule
Computed from the recurrence rule we record for this entry, not copied from a listing. A date marked ~ comes from a calendar conversion and the observance may fall a day or two either side.