Cold, fresh mountain air; the smell of dancing fire; the warmth of friends on a clear autumn night. What could be better?

I still have many of the holy fuck, I live in Japan, moments. Sometimes it’s wandering through a department store and gawking at the myriad of delicious food vendors (which I did in the morning, landing on a couple of tuna hand rolls).

Other times it’s experiences like this. Kurama Fire Festival.

None of us knew what to expect. We spent the day in Kyoto then headed north for the mountains, arriving in a world aglow with countless swaying flames, surrounded by soaring pines and the silhouette of the hill rising toward a yellow quarter moon, luminous in the night sky.

Women and men carried massive torches through the streets of Kurama, a town which must be so beautiful in daylight, for a river flowed gently beside us.

Some fires were small and contained in front of people’s homes, tended only by them. Bonfires lined the sides of the roads.

How… An ancient tradition, a wooden town and a sort of medieval energy as if nothing’s changed for hundreds of years.