Honolulu Festival will light up the sky this weekend

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COURTESY HONOLULU FESTIVAL

Honolulu Festival events will conclude Sunday with the Nagaoka Fireworks Show, pictured above last year, over Waikiki Beach.

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COURTESY HONOLULU FESTIVAL

Honolulu Festival events will conclude Sunday with a Grand Parade along Kalakaua Avenue, featuring performers, floats and a fire-breathing dragon known as Daijayama.

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The theme of this year’s Honolulu Festival is “Harmony Over the Ocean, Journey to Peace,” but that doesn’t mean there won’t be fireworks.

The free festival, which runs Friday through Sunday, will conclude with the Nagaoka Fireworks Show over Waikiki Beach. The event is a smaller version of the Nagaoka Festival Fireworks, held in August along Japan’s Shinano riverbanks. The Japan celebration got its start in 1946 as a war-damage reconstruction festival and has grown into one of that country’s three largest fireworks events.

The 15-minute pyrotechnic show here is an outgrowth of the sister-city relationship between Nagaoka and Honolulu, which began in 2012 to help the cities move past their shared memories of war. The 8:30 p.m. fireworks will follow Sunday’s Grand Parade, which is expected to start at 4 p.m., sending marching bands, floats, cultural performers and a fire-breathing dragon known as Daijayama down Kalakaua Avenue.

Some 5,000 people and 150 groups are expected to participate in this year’s festival, which offers free art and cultural displays and entertainment throughout the weekend. For a full listing of events and venues, visit honolulufestival.com.

“Hawaii is such a diverse place with much cultural influence from the Pacific Rim. We are excited to bring a taste of that culture to the island for locals and visitors of Hawaii to experience,” said Tsukasa Harufuku, president of the Honolulu Festival Foundation, in a statement.

The festival’s goal to perpetuate “strong cultural and ethnic ties” between the Asia-Pacific and Hawaii comes at a time when heightened tensions with North Korea have reminded many that it’s good to have friends. The festival is also a strong tourist draw that could offset a slight dip in Japanese tourism to Hawaii.

In January, Japanese visitors to Hawaii declined nearly 4 percent to 118,767 from the same month in 2017, and their spending dropped just over 4 percent to nearly $192 million.

Since its start in 1995, the Honolulu Festival has brought tens of thousands of visitors to Hawaii, bolstering tourism during what is generally an off-peak travel period. Organizers also anticipate a strong local turnout.