Just 40 minutes outside the elegance of Paris, there’s a place where dragons sleep under castles, pirates sail through glowing caves, and you might just bump into a mouse wearing red shorts and yellow shoes. No, this isn’t a hallucination brought on by too much fromage—this is Disneyland Paris, and it’s every bit as magical as it sounds.

Every spring, as the night wraps Toyama Bay in a blanket of stars, another constellation appears just below the surface of the sea. Glowing blue, pulsing softly, the firefly squid—known in Japan as Hotaru Ika—emerges from the depths in a dazzling marine light show that defies logic and feels like magic.