Today we went to Minato-mirai to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the opening of Yokohama harbor (and therefore all of Japan) to foreign traffic. The theme was "thanks to the harbor".

There was a lot of people there, and while we enjoyed the day-light festivities and sampled all the foreign festival cuisine, as the evening came, and the prospect of a serious fireworks display at 8:30pm, so did the people.

In principle, I like people. In practice however, whenever they manage into crowds, its a statistical certainty that they will start doing things that make them become, as a unit, stupid.
So for this reason, we decided to skip fighting with the crowd, and just pack it in early.

(If you want a visual, imagine a dad, gleefully video-taping the strapping young pride of his loins attempting to rip a branch off one of the carefully landscaped trees in the public park. Now imagine what I said to him.)

Its a shame, as we left there were some pretty amazing fireworks going up, but there was not much room, and little will for a fight with the crowds.