Today, a photo and a pair of haiku about my encounter with an urban warrior who has seen better days.

Lamenting, a lone
samurai scarecrow. Distraught,
group cannot be found.

No trendy wardrobe.
Falling apart and ignored.
A fate worse than death.

I found this scarecrow on a hillside garden with a great view of the Kitakyushu expressway and the associated snarl of ramps known as the Otani (大谷—big valley) interchange. I took the picture last year on the same Friday-the-thirteenth trip as yesterday’s unstoppable vending corner photo. It turns out that I didn’t hike all the way up and down Mount Sarakura that day—I confused it with a different trip—I just biked along a path that skirts the base of the mountain well above most of the residential areas.

This type of garden is fairly common. In many cases it’s hard to tell whether the land actually belongs to the person tending it or whether the intrepid gardeners are squatters. Regardless, these interstitial gardens are all over the place. There’s one along the road up to the art museum. Many more in tiny wedges of land between train tracks and roadways. More on the hillsides below my school. They invariably have cobbled-together fences, and an assortment makeshift trellises and scarecrows.

I like the bell.