At military ports like Kure where many battleships congregated, gunpowder was color-coded so each ship’s gunners could identify where their shots landed. In this dramatic scene from In This Corner of the World, Suzu witnesses these colored bursts during an air raid, and envisions paint daubs in the sky.
By contrast, land-based antiaircraft guns (or “high fire cannons,” as the army calls them) produced only white and black smoke.
