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.
Category Archives: Japan
Kitakyushu Strange, Part 2
I think I’ve mentioned before the ubiquity of vending machines in this country. After dark, many are the solitary machines casting their neon glow as they stand in mute servitude to shift workers, motor scooter gangs, and petty criminals who ply their trade in a fitfully slumbering city. I knew she was trouble from the moment her feet, clad only in black fishnets and red pumps—the kind you see in Kokura on a Saturday afternoon—appeared in my doorway and hijacked my post. A group of vending machines installed together and operated by the same company or individual are usually called a vending corner.
Horse Archery in Aso
Yabusame is a festival that involves house-mounted archers, special arrows and targets, and Shinto ritual. As luck would have it, last fall we happened to be in the right place at the right time to attend such a festival.
Kitakyushu Strange, Part 1
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.
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?
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.