A Night of Civil Disobedience

I spent the evening expressly ignoring police orders. But let me start by saying that whoever said Japanese people are quiet has never been to the Sumidagawa Fireworks Festival. This show is billed as the biggest fireworks display in Tokyo, and very possibly the world. 1,ooo,ooo people + 20,000 fireworks = lots of noise. After braving the crowds on the subway (hey, that's part of the fun), I managed to follow the yukata-clad girls chattering on their cell phones up to the street. It turns out that Tokyo, with all of its tall buildings, is not the prime location for fireworks because there are about five good places to actually see anything. I found a great place just outside the station but it happened to be in the middle of an intersection that was crawling with police trying to keep it clear despite the closure of the street. Turns out, and this is the surprising part, in a society where hardly anyone would think to steal a bike (most bikes on the street aren't locked) or use a half-priced child's ticket to get on a train (even though no one really checks), these people were completely ignoring the police. I stood in the midst of ten policemen yelling on loudspeakers to clear the area for an hour. Granted they were doing a pretty half-assed job--only taking an interest in yelling at the crowd between bouts of fireworks and basking in the fact that this was in fact the best vantage point--still, no one paid a bit of attention. I did learn lots of different ways to say, "You can't stand here" though. My favorite part was when they started telling people that this was a bad place to watch the fireworks and that there was a much better place down the street. Which, remember, is less effective when you turn around to watch the fireworks in the middle of yelling that there's a better place. That's just plain manipulative, and was quickly proven false when all the people that went down the street came back. Hey, my excuse is that I'm a foreigner and therefore am not expected to understand Japanese so I had no idea that I wasn't supposed to be in the middle of the street. My other favorite part was that when the girl standing directly in front of me lit up a cigarette and I thought I was going to choke, the policeman came over to tell her to put it out and she did! Talk about selective listening. So between the police on their loudspeakers and people switching between talking on their phones and periodically yelling, "Sugoooooooi!!! (Awesooooooome!!)" at the fireworks, I could barely hear the explosions of the fireworks themselves of which there were never less than 20 in the sky at a time. It was absolutely incredible.