The Festival and Its River

The Sumida River Fireworks Festival traces its origin to 1733, when the eighth shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune ordered a fireworks display at Ryogoku to pray for relief from a famine and epidemic that had swept Edo. The event was called 'Kawabiraki', the opening of the river for summer. Two pyrotechnic families, Tamaya and Kagiya, competed for the crowd's favour from opposite banks. People packed the bridges, the boats, and every inch of the embankment. The shouts of 'Tamaya!' and 'Kagiya!' became part of the city's vocabulary, and they still are.

The festival was suspended during the Second World War and again in 1961 due to traffic and crowd management concerns. It was revived in 1978 under its current name, and the Sumida Ward and Taito Ward have co-hosted it ever since. The two-site format, with Site 1 dedicated to a judged competition among pyrotechnic makers and Site 2 running the main display, was introduced to preserve the competitive spirit of the original Kawabiraki while giving the full riverbank crowd a continuous show. The 2026 edition marks the continuation of that structure, with ten makers entering the Site 1 competition and the combined shell count reaching approximately 20,000.