Author: Sumida Fireworks.
Title: Fireworks.
Description: Tokyo-To Tourist Assn. [1948]. 18x11cm publisher's colour woodcut card wrapper, cord tied; 12pp with a few illustrations, eight pages of illustrated adverts and two mounted colour woodcuts (miniature Hiroshiges). ¶ Quite cute, issued for the 1948 Sumida fireworks contest on September 18 it includes a complete list of the 278 fireworks to be launched; the first 122 are daytime fireworks. According to received history this event didn't happen. Most accounts tell us the festival stopped before the war and didn't start again until 1978 but a first hand account by the daughter of an organiser says that fireworks were set off on August 1st 1948 and the festival continued until the early sixties when the river was deemed too polluted and foul. By the late seventies the river had been revived and the contest resumed in 1978.August 1st was apparently the day the national ban on fireworks was lifted which may be the reason for that date being remembered. So did the contest happen in September?

Keywords: fireworks technology trades pyrotechnics c20th Japan Asia social history entertainment trades manufactures science meiji