We went to the gate to buy the 'spare' tickets and the atmosphere was incredible. There were literally thousands of people pouring into the stadium from all directions, all wearing their team colours. The air was so incredibly electric.
Being such a popular game and leading up to end of the season, the game was fully sold out. But every cloud has it's silver lining. Instead we took a train to watch the largest fireworks show in Western Japan.
The particular speciality of this show, is how they actually explode from the ocean, and many of them explode 'up' in a kind of 'half-firework' that doesn't shoot up into the sky first.
Combine this with the image of the famous Torii in the water and you have some incredible visuals.
http://www.japan-fireworks.com/gallery/regular4/miyajima.jpeg
We didn't actually go to the Torii because it was so incredibly busy. We took a station further where there was a nice pier and could see it from a fair way aways. There are lots of mountains and islands near this area of Japan (literally called the Inland Sea since there are so many islands), and it created a very cool aesthetic during dusk before the fireworks went off.
These colours aren't edited. Simply amazing.
So big. We were about 15 km away and you could still see they all covered an immense distance. The delayed sound reverberating off the mountains and islands was amazing too.
