Kokura Fashion Report Postscript

Or, The Screaming Toddler, or The Real Reason I Had To Revise the Fashion Report

This post is only about fashion because it has to do with the Kokura fashion report posts. Other than that, it’s a rant about the strangeness of Japan. So if you’re traversing my site by category, you might want to skip this one. The rest of you will either be amused or horrified.

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Kokura Spring 2005 Fashion Report, Day 4 Part 2

Continuing from yesterday’s post of pictures from May 5—today’s are from the same day—we’ll work our way back through the arcades near Kokura station and finish up at Riverwalk. We’ve got moms and daughters—two sets!—as well as a bit of navel gazing, someone who appears to have given up his worldly possessions for a higher purpose, and the usual short skirts. Thankfully, this is the final installment of my five-part series on this year’s spring fashions in Kokura.

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Kokura Spring 2005 Fashion Report, Day 4 Part 1

First, a confession. Because Lia knew that I’d finished writing this fashion report and then serialized it, she demanded to immediately read it through to the end. This is an exclusive privilege limited to people who don’t yell at me too much for filing my tax returns late have physical access to my computer so the rest of you will have to wait. But that’s just backstory.

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Kokura Spring 2005 Fashion Report, Day 3

I’m sure you’ve all been wondering what a dog, an incognito Marvel superhero, and the sacred feminine have in common. The answer is: Green Day in Kokura!

Friday April 29th marked the start of Golden Week, a series of civic holidays that are very close together. The rest of the Golden Week holiday was the Tuesday through Thursday of the following week. We also took the Monday and Friday off, and had a ten-day weekend. April 29th is Green Day, named in honour of an American rock band.

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Kokura Spring 2005 Fashion Report: Introduction

I had a request for a fashion report, so here it is. I did random street photography in Kokura over a period of three weeks this year starting on April 16, and ending on May 4. For the most part, I did the camerawork while on errands with Lia or Jarrod. Or sometimes with both of them.

I was originally going to make this one long post, but it took on a life of its own. Unlike the saga of my Kitakyushu bike ride, however, it’s not quite dissertation-length. I started out with 34 images, then added a few more for a total of about 58. So I’ve split it into posts based on the dates I took the pictures. There’s today’s long overview followed by five pages of photos.

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Rural Kitakyushu: Dammed Rivers

Take the many rivers and mountains of Japan, a large pool of available labour, and a government with a rural power base and a tendency to sponsor megaprojects, and you get expressways to nowhere and dams and reservoirs everywhere. Yesterday I wrote about a super-intense fisherman I saw in one section of the Masubuchi Reservoir. Today I’ll write some more about the reservoir and its associated dams.

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Keep Out the Fashion Police!

At the beginning of March, Carly and Margaret—friends from Toronto—were in town for a short visit. We only had one afternoon together but we had a fabulous time, enjoying okonomiyaki (お好み焼き, a kind of pancake with all sorts of savory stuff mixed into the batter), ginger-ale flavoured Halls cough drops, and the “balmy” 6°C-with-snow-flurries weather. Domo-kun was witness to it all. Unfortunately we weren’t able to find any of the seasonal passionfruit flavoured kit-kat bars. Maybe next time.

We took them to Kokura Castle, which is a replica built from concrete in 1959. The castle is quite picturesque and boasts one of the largest paper-doll dioramas in Japan. The diorama is a model of a Kokura as a traditional Japanese castle town, complete with townsfolk and markets, feudal lords, stray dogs, Christian missionaries, ninjas, and an assortment of other nefarious characters. Kokura being a coastal town, the diorama even has people catching blowfish in the Kanmon Strait.

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Shoes

Today’s Japan field report is a fashion mini-report about shoes. I know that some of you are interested in Japanese fashion, and some love shoes. This was originally going to be heavy on photos and light on commentary but I seem to have found a lot to say about a subject I don’t know much about. Even so, those of you not interested in footwear might want to skip this one.

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