Today my day was filled with mapmaking for a guidebook that’s going to be given to all of the new JET participants at the end of the summer. So in order to keep everyone entertained, I’m falling back on yet more proof of the uphill battle I’m fighting as an English teacher in Japan.

Tomorrow we’ll visit Space World. In the meantime, here’s a photo I took in the parking lot of Homewide—a store that’s very similar to Wal-Mart—in Tagawa. Tagawa is a small city south of Kitakyushu. It’s a former centre of coal mining that sports a mountain the top of which has been lopped off to supply raw materials for Japan’s ravenous concrete factories. I thought I had a photo of the flattened mountain but I can’t find it. I guess I know where I’ll be going to take pictures on the weekend.

But I digress. Here’s the photo from the Homewide parking lot, 23 October 2004.

I just wonder what’s actually in the truck.