I found these snake figurines one night in a small altar about 10 minutes’ walk from home.
I do not think it means…
…what you think it means. The Japanese love to decorate things with words from foreign languages. They also like to combine foreign words to create new vocabulary. A case in point is the wanpeesu (one piece)—a dress. Many of the shops, buildings, and products here are labelled in a way that makes me wonder if they have any understanding of the chosen language. Here’s a selection of decorative English (and a bit of French) at its best.
Riverwalk Kitakyushu
Here are a bunch of photos for fans of contemporary Japanese architecture. Riverwalk Kitakyushu is a large mall complex near downtown Kokura. Kokura is the larger of two commercial districts in Kitakyushu and was the original target for the atomic bomb which was dropped on Nagasaki.
Site Revisions/New Features
The information in this post is not accurate effective February 2005, when I switched my blog software from Greymatter to WordPress.
=====
More Shimonoseki Fish
Someone asked me to post more pictures of fish from or trip to the Shimonoseki Aquarium. So here they are.
More on Todaiji in Nara
By request, here are some more pictures of Todaiji Temple in Nara. The original entry about Nara is was on April 14, 2004. As I mentioned in that entry, Todaiji is the world’s tallest wooden building and houses a giant bronze statue of Buddha.
Golden Week Crowds: Shimonoseki
Golden Week is a series of about a week’s worth of statutory holidays around the beginning of May. It’s notorious for being a time where every Japanese person travels to another part of the country or else to another country entirely. All of the transportation networks are clogged and all of the tourist traps are overrun. This year was no exception but there was also a lot more travel outside of Japan due to fears about SARS having been much smaller than last year.
Fashion math: Richard Simmons + Yelvis
Who would have thought that clothing and math could be so easy and work together so well? Today’s fashion equation is RS + Y = GT. In plain English: Richard Simmons + Yelvis = one of the local Gym Teachers.
Waking up in Nikko
Everyone has their own sense of decor. And temporality. Tonight I’m going to write more about my spring vacation, but I’m jumping back to the beginning whereas my last post was about the end. I know this is pretty nonlinear but I’ll leave it to someone else to piece together the chronology.
Ghost entries
Edited 2006-12-17 to note that the following URL is no longer valid, and that the problem was a combination of my old blogging system (Greymatter) and the caching system at my ISP.
The blog is misbehaving. Some entries show up on the main page in Explorer and Navigator but in Safari sometimes they don’t appear. But they do show up in the archives in all three browsers. If you’re using Safari, click on the Archives link to get a complete view.