Hirayama Fireworks Manufacturing Co.
Jinta Hirayama (1840–1900) did not begin life as a showman. He was born in the castle town of Toyohashi, Japan, and started his career in the less-than-explosive domain of accounting. Keeping the books could not hold him for long, though. He drifted to the booming port of Yokohama, tried his hand at a string of businesses, and in 1877, with a partner named Iwata Shigeho, founded Hirayama Fireworks Manufacturing Co.
Their timing was good and their debut was loud. On November 3, 1877, the Emperor's birthday, Hirayama staged a display in Yokohama Park that went over so well the orders started pouring in, arriving first from across Japan and then from overseas.
Japanese fireworks of the era tended to burn in a single sober shade of orange; Hirayama is remembered as one of the people who dragged them into full color. But color only worked after dark. So Hirayama set himself a stranger problem: how to decorate the sky while the sun was still up.
Hirayama's solution was to give up on light entirely and work in paper. His daylight fireworks didn't burst into sparks — they burst into things. Packed inside each shell were folded figures cut from thin, flexible paper — birds, fish, animals, little human characters, flags — each one weighted along its lower edge and left open underneath. The shell was fired high into the air, a small charge popped at altitude, and the figures spilled out into the open sky. Caught by the air and steadied by their weights, they inflated like windsocks and sank slowly back toward the crowd, holding their shapes the whole way down. A goldfish. A warrior. A turtle, paddling through nothing. There were variations, too: shells that released clouds of colored smoke, or showered the audience with streamers, confetti, and small toys.
Hirayama received a US patent for his daylight fireworks in August of 1883 and is widely cited as the first Japanese citizen to hold one (Japan wouldn't adopt a patent system of its own until 1885).
Hirayama marketed his daylight and nighttime bomb shells worldwide through catalogues filled with striking woodblock prints. The nighttime shells got the boldest renderings: pared down to their essentials, each burst becomes a clean, almost abstract bloom of color against the dark. A reminder of a man whose explosive imagination colored the sky.
Our Products Featuring Hirayama Fireworks Prints:
