In which I briefly mention American white trash during a tangent about a fashionable hat, but mostly talk about a day spent shopping, visiting friends, cooking, and packing.
Today we spent some time with Lia’s friend Yoko. We did a little shopping, ordered a couple of inkans—Japanese name stamps—and had lunch with Yoko’s parents. Later, I cooked up a storm, and we had a fabulous supper.
Today we revisit the photos I took at the Comme Ça Store in Riverwalk Kitakyushu a few days before Christmas 2003. I was rendered completely speechless at the time, but I’ve since recovered. Even so, before reading further you may want to put down any food and drink you might be consuming.
I’m not making any promises, but don’t say I didn’t warn you, either.
Judging from the number of photos I’ve taken of them, I must have some kind of obsession with the mannequins at the Comme Ça Store. Today I have photos from the Canal City mall location in Fukuoka.
And before I forget, happy Canada Day! The rest of this post has nothing to do with Canada’s birthday, but you’re welcome to read on anyway.
In yesterday’s post, Pat asked if that really was a dog among the window display mannequins. The question made me realize that I’ve come to see pet mannequins as a normal part of the shopping experience. They just blend in with everything else and seem so unremarkable that I can’t even remember if there are such things back home. Are there?
In any case, for today’s post I made a slightly clearer crop of yesterday’s photo, starring the dog. And then I dug through my photo archives for some more samples.
Continuing the mannequin theme—and in honour of the recent legislation that made it through Canada’s House of Commons—here’s a quickie of the street level window display at the Riverwalk Comme Ça store.
You can skip this preamble if you want, and go directly to the next paragraph. I had a really long day, filled with correspondence and bureaucracy, mostly having to do with our preparations to play continent leapfrog—unrelated to incontinent leapfrog, something that I do not want to see—starting in July. So today’s post is much shorter than I had hoped. I’ll probably end up splitting what could be one long post into a series of shorter ones.
I’ve written briefly the Comme Ça Store before. It’s a chain of stores that primarily sell clothing. You can read more about them in the I do not think it means… post, which was one my first descriptions of strange English usage in Japan. The Comme Ça description in that writeup is too brief but it’ll have to do. You may have to scroll down or do a text search to get to the Comme Ça part.
But enough about the past. Today you get a brief description—and two photos—of a small corner of the baby wear section of the Comme Ça Store.
Today I have yet another photo that I took near Riverwalk in Kitakyushu. Just two lovers an ordinary couple sitting on a park bench their bodies touching in the late afternoon, holding hands in the moonlight watching the Murasaki River.
I remember doing an almost whiplash-inducing doubletake at the guy’s shirt. Contrary to what one would expect, there is not, in fact, any massacred English. Just a slight amount of confusion as to the original intentions of the author of the text. Oh yeah, it’s at this point that I should warn the parents of any minors in my audience that there is profanity in the photo that follows.
A pachinko parlour in rural Japan evokes memories of the late-90s stock market boom. And bust.
I’ve been meaning to write about pachinko parlours for awhile, but haven’t had time or energy to do the research necessary to do the subject justice. Plus I still haven’t organized my photo library enough to be able to easily extract sets of photos by keyword. Instead of an exhaustive report, today I’ll simply post one photo I came across while I was looking at pictures I took almost exactly a year ago.
If you’re one to pay attention to these things, you’ll have noticed that this is the second poetry-related post in two days. Poetry lives!
At one point, this post was turning into a longish text that sounded more like a funeral speech than birthday wishes. Luckily, I know a good frankeneditor who cut out all the eulogizing.
Apologies in advance for the briefness of this post, but I’m being forced by the organized member of the family into living up to the duties of someone who will be moving to another continent in less than a month.
Today I have, for your entertainment, edification, and reading pleasure, three found poems, discovered on bicycles in the bike shelter next to our building.