Rather than show photos of the rest of the major tourist attractions in Kitakyushu, I’m going to post pictures of some of the stuff you’re unlikely to see in a tourist guide. A What They Left Out of the Kitakyushu Tourist Guide guide to the city, as it were. This is the first installment.
Yearly Archives: 2005
Sugawara Shrine
Last week I wrote about a Amida-in which is a Buddhist Temple. This week we’ll visit a Shinto Shrine called Sugawara-jinja. Jinja is one of the suffixes denoting a shrine and has nothing to do with black-clad Japanese assassins appearing from inside magic lamps. Other suffixes that indicate a shrine include -gu, -jingu, and -sha. Shrines appear on Japanese maps as a stylized torii gate. For karmic balance, I’d better tell you the suffixes for Buddhist temples. They include -in, -ji, -tera, and -dera, and are shown on maps as a swastika.
Sugawara Shrine, or Sugawara-jinja, is about a ten-minute walk from our apartment. As can be expected, it’s on a hill, but if you choose your route carefully it’s relatively painless to get there. From what I can tell, it’s a minor shrine, famous for the person it was built in honour of.
Chinese Food, Indian’s-style
Last fall we got a flyer in the mail for a new Chinese restaurant that was opening up. I was going to scan in the flyer and try to write something witty about it but lethargy set in and I never got around to it. I’ve since passed by the place on the bus a number of times but it’s a major trek for someone without a car so until tonight I didn’t have a chance to take a photo. This evening I was walking home from Kokura so I made a point of going by. With camera in hand.
Space Conspiracy
In honour of the astronomer in the family, who is celebrating a non-prime number birthday today, we’ll explore space. Not just any space, but an unreasonable paranoid facsimile thereof. For further mind warpage, check out the birthday-related links on my unchi post from a few days ago. Ok. Got your flight suits on? Ready for a journey among the stars? Let’s begin.
Japan is a land of technology. Robots, video games, and computerized toilets are but a few of the high-tech marvels. There’s also a fairly-well developed aerospace industry. How does a country that has made mimicry of the west its stock-in-trade for better part of the last hundred years represent its star-gazing ambitions?
Housekeeping and Random Gifts
I have some questions for my readers today, a repaired post, and a chance for you to win yummy prizes.
New Ideas in Marketing
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.
A Special Day for a Special Unchi
Yet another post during what was supposed to be Kitakyushu week, that is only tangentially related to Kitakyushu.
Unchi. What is it? It’s shit, of course. Poop, crap, feces. Number two. A particular stylized kind of shit that only the Japanese with their weird fetishes could dream up. A cartoon coil that spirals up into a cone.
Another Earthquake
We had another earthquake today. It woke us up sometime between six and six-thirty this morning. Not being a morning person, I don’t recall the exact time but the news reports tell me that it started at 6:11. It didn’t feel as strong or last as long as the one on March 20th.
I’ve been told that the quake was centred around the same area as the one from March 20th, and had a magnitude of 5.7 (update: some places are reporting 5.3). There’s a map here. I tried to go back to sleep, but there were a number of aftershocks that kept interrupting. Under different circumstances I’d have appreciated the full body massage.
Amida-in (Buddha Temple) Takami, Kitakyushu
I have a writeup introducing Kitakyushu in the works, but it’s taking on a life of its own and needs a fair bit of editing and fact-checking. Until it’s ready, please bear with the shorter posts.
Here’s a temple that I pass every day on my way to and from work. It’s on the same chain of hills as the art museum that I wrote about awhile back, in the Takami (高見) area of Yahata Higashi Ward (八幡東区). It’s about a twenty-minute walk from our apartment, ten or fifteen minutes by bike.
Ogopogo Redux
Just a quick post today as I’m working on my pictorial guide to Kitakyushu.
While out doing errands on the weekend, I had an experience that made me wonder if I should start wearing my tinfoil hat again. Less than a week after my Ogopogo post, Lia and I saw the beast again. Makes me wonder if someone with access to a large-balloon-animal factory has been spying on my blog.