Name: Numata Fireworks Festival
Start: 2026-09-12T19:00:00+00:00
End: 2026-09-12T19:45:00+00:00
Location: Numatashi Sports Park

Numata Fireworks Festival

Sep 12, 2026 at 7:00pm ~ Sep 12, 2026 at 7:45pm

By mid-September, Tokyo’s fireworks calendar has gone dark. Sumidagawa, Edogawa and Jingu Gaien have all packed up, and anyone still craving a hanabi fix has to leave the city for it. Numata, a castle town perched on a river terrace in northern Gunma, makes a strong case for the trip. The 14th Numata Fireworks Festival takes place on Saturday, September 12, packing around 10,000 fireworks into a fast 45-minute show from 7pm to 7:45pm.

The festival has an unusual backstory. Numata went 43 years without a fireworks festival before locals revived it in 2013, and the event has scaled up every year since with the stated goal of showing off the city to the rest of the country. The show is produced by Marutamaya, a pyrotechnics firm behind major displays across Japan, and leans heavily on music-synchronized sequences, ending in a grand finale. Cramming a Sumidagawa-sized shell count into 45 minutes means there is no downtime; the sky stays busy from the first launch to the last.

Free lawns, paid front rows

Everything happens at Numata Sports Park, with gates opening at 4pm. The early opening is worth using. Local restaurants run food stalls alongside vendors selling regional products, and September in Gunma’s highlands is cool enough to make an afternoon picnic genuinely pleasant rather than an endurance test. Unlike Tokyo’s stadium-locked Jingu Gaien event, general viewing in the park is free; reserved paid seating at the front is available for those who want guaranteed sightlines. Last year’s paid options included chair seats from ¥4,000, camera tripod spots for ¥8,000 and tables for groups at ¥25,000, with booking handled online through e-plus or by fax, the latter being a very Gunma touch.

The catch: getting to Numata

This is the one part that takes planning. The park is a 25-minute walk from JR Numata Station on the Joetsu Line; from Tokyo, take the Joetsu Shinkansen to Takasaki and transfer. There is no shuttle bus, and while around 2,700 temporary parking spaces open up, some require advance reservation and the roads out of town jam solid after the finale. Trains back to Tokyo run late enough to make it a day trip, but Numata sits at the gateway to Oze and Fukiwari Falls, so an overnight stay turns the festival into a weekend.