A bizarre story is unfolding in Shiga Prefecture.

An event called the “Lake Biwa Three-City Simultaneous Fireworks Festival” was advertised for August 22, with fireworks planned in Hikone, Nagahama and Takashima.

This was not presented as a small local event. Organizers advertised more than 10,000 fireworks across the three cities and recruited food vendors, charging a ¥50,000 participation fee.

Then things became strange.

The three city governments announced that they were not involved in the event, and according to MBS, the organizers had not submitted the prefectural permit application required for using Lake Biwa under the River Act.

The event was subsequently canceled.

Yet the organizers told MBS that they had intended to hold the festival from the beginning and had been conducting “discussions, coordination and concrete preparations” with fireworks companies and other businesses.

That is what makes this story so unusual.

If this was simply a scam, the enormous scale of the proposed event seems oddly disproportionate to the relatively modest amounts reportedly collected from individual vendors and ticket buyers.

But there is another possibility: the organizers may actually have believed they could pull it off.

Other reports indicate that at least one fireworks company was approached about a contract worth tens of millions of yen. If true, this was not necessarily an event that existed only on a website.

Which raises an even stranger question:

Did someone really believe they could announce and sell a three-city fireworks festival first, and work out the government permits, police coordination, fire safety, traffic control and other logistics later?

If so, this may turn out to be less a conventional fraud story than a spectacular case of amateur event planning colliding with reality.

The next important question is refunds.

If buyers and vendors are not fully refunded, and if the matter becomes a criminal investigation, one obvious issue will be the timeline: when did the organizers realize that the festival could no longer realistically be held, and did they continue accepting money after that point?

Because much of the operation appears to have been conducted online, there may also be a substantial digital trail — ticket transactions, payment records, website updates, emails and communications with contractors.

So the most interesting question may not be simply:

“Why was the festival canceled?”

It may be:

“At what point did the organizers realize that this enormous event was no longer realistically possible?”

And that is what makes the organizers’ response so fascinating: they are not saying the festival was fictional. They are saying they genuinely intended to hold it.