March 2012
2 posts
Last hike
The packing is getting done quickly, and the sun was shining today, so I took time out for a last hike. I wanted to do a loop of the interesting trails north-east of Yaizu:
up Mt. Takakusa
down to the Kurakake Pass
up Mt. Mankanho
down the Sakasagawa River and past its lovely tea farms
through the 100+ year old brick tunnel under the Utsunoya Pass
and down the historic Old Tokaido...
What I'll miss, and what I'm looking forward to
Less than two weeks left of my time in Japan. I started to brainstorm a list of all the things I’ll miss here. I’m also making a list of all the things I’m looking forward to in Canada.
What I’ll miss
fresh rice balls for lunch every day
seafood, seafood, and more seafood
green tea
bird-watching in the paddies, along the streams, and down at the port
the...
February 2012
2 posts
My secret hideout
Since I’ve only got a few weeks left in Japan, it’s time to reveal the location of my secret hideout. It’s a little cafe called Kamakura about five minutes from home. I go here a few times a month when I need a quiet place to work and/or a getaway from the chaos at home.
It’s got a lovely traditional interior: paper window screens, hand-plastered walls, dark wood...
Smallest orange in the world
Japan has many kinds of oranges: mikans, ponkans, etc. This is a kinkan. Looks fairly ordinary, right?
But let’s zoom back a little …
Isn’t that crazy? This has got to be the smallest orange in the world. Even crazier is how you eat it: you don’t peel it, you just pop the whole thing in your mouth. For some reason the peel is the sweetest part. Demented.
December 2011
1 post
High Road to Shizuoka
(Starring Mt. Fuji, an elevated highway above the ocean, and a place called 大崩 (Okuzure), meaning “big landslide”. You’ll see why in a minute.)
There’s a narrow road that runs along the coast from Yaizu up to Shizuoka, between Mt. Hanazawa and the water. It’s basically cliffs most of the way along, and very picturesque. I decided it would make a good jogging route....
October 2011
3 posts
Mikans, Tea, and Eagles
— Another beautiful Tuesday morning, another impromptu decision to skive off work and go hiking. This time I set out to climb Mankanho, whose name could be translated as “Full View Mtn.” I was hoping for a view of Fuji, and as you can see from the pic above I was not disappointed.
I biked to the trail head in Hanazawa, a little hamlet up a mountain valley on the north edge...
Larva Update
— For those interested in our Rhinoceros Beetle Larvae: We changed their dirt last weekend, which gave me a chance to photograph the larvae.
The adults are extremely cool looking. With thanks to Wikipedia, here’s a pic of the Japanese variety, called a Kabutomushi カブトムシ, literally “helmet beetle”. There’s a funny short horn from the top of his forehead, and a much...
The rice harvest
— If you’re dying for more videos of rice farming machinery at work, you’ve come to the right blog post.
First, a reminder of the story so far: Back in May we watched the plowing of the paddies, and the incredibly cool footage of the rice planting machine. In June we saw the green glow of the rice seedlings. By August the rice plants were almost a metre high.
Soon the tops of...
Mt. Hanazawa
I woke up Tuesday morning to discover it was gorgeous: cool, blue skies, clear air. I immediately decided to skive off work for the morning and hike up a mountain.
The mountain was Hanazawa, which sits along the coast between Yaizu and Shizuoka City. The trail head is at [A] on the picture below, near the big spa-hotels that overlook Yaizu. The trail winds its way along the ridge to [B], the...
September 2011
4 posts
Swan dive
The view from my in-laws’ back deck at sunset. I’m so tempted to do a swan dive into that lovely gold-green sea of rice.
Giant praying mantis
This praying mantis was a good 4” long. Mind you, I suppose he has to be that big to eat the other insects I’ve seen here, including a 2” cockroach and a spider that (with its legs spread out) would have been bigger than my hand.
Typhoon #15 Aftermath
I was trapped in the library at Shizuoka University most of the day. The wind and rain were incredible. Then, around 5 pm, it all just stopped. Here’s some of the damage I saw on my way home. (I had to walk most of the way back to the train station, because the buses hadn’t started running again.)
The university has one main road that snakes up through the campus. Anybody parked...
Tuna Boat
For a break today I went for a bike ride down by the docks. I happened to arrive at the same time as a tuna boat, so I got to watch them unload the catch. My town is unimportant in most ways, but it happens to be the #2 tuna port in the whole of Japan. (#1 is the famous Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, where tourists go at 6 am to watch the fish being auctioned).
The ship itself is covered with...
August 2011
7 posts
Where I Live
We finally got around to climbing Mt. Takakusa, the mountain that makes up the northern border of Yaizu. This is the best place for an aerial view of the town. It feels rural to me when I’m on the ground, but in the bird’s eye view it looks quite built up. The straight black line is the bullet train, and the curvy line is the highway.
On the way up there was also a number of tea...
Yet Another Crazy Japanese Slide
1000 men in loincloths carrying the Ark of the...
Apart from O-Bon, this week has also featured the main Yaizu City summer festival. The highlight of that is the parade of mikoshi. A mikoshi is a sort of portable Shinto shrine, carried by dozens of men on long poles. If you remember the Ark of the Convenant from Raiders of the Lost Ark, you’ve got the concept. The idea is that the Shinto god temporarily leaves their shrine and travels...
Rice Update #2
I know some of you are dying to hear how the rice is growing. The paddies have been allowed to dry out so much the ground cracked, and then they’ve been re-flooded, and the cycle has been repeated several times. Weird, but it works: the rice has been growing like mad, each little seedling now a clump of grass almost a metre high. Just in the past few days the rice itself has begun to appear...
O-bon
Last Sunday we got to participate in my in-laws’ O-bon traditions. As always, the most concise explanation comes from Wikipedia: “Obon is a Japanese Buddhist custom to honor the departed (deceased) spirits of one’s ancestors. This Buddhist custom has evolved into a family reunion holiday during which people return to ancestral family places and visit and clean their...
Tanabata
(In which Gordon discovers the Japanese do decorate Christmas trees. Except they’re bamboo, and in August.)
Background, according to Wikipedia: “Tanabata (meaning “Evening of the seventh”) is a Japanese star festival. It celebrates the meeting of the deities Orihime and Hikoboshi (represented by the stars Vega and Altair respectively). According to legend, the Milky Way...
The Labyrinth
Last weekend at Fuji Children’s World we discovered a play structure which is possibly cooler than all the others I’ve blogged about. It’s called “The Labyrinth”. Imagine that a group of archaeologists had uncovered the foundations of a ruined medieval castle or cathedral, and then turned the dig site into a playground. There are stone walls, trenches, narrow passages, tunnels, caves, and hidden...
July 2011
10 posts
Drinkable boxed coffee!
I’ve been experimenting for two months with various canned coffees and drinking-box coffees. (Hey, you would too if an ordinary Starbucks coffee cost $4!) Most of them are exceedingly gross. Typically the first ingredient is “dairy product” and the next two ingredients are sugar and concentrated white grape juice. If you’re lucky, coffee is maybe the fifth ingredient, and...
Birds of the Paddies, Part 2
This is an update to my previous birding post (http://japalibrarian.tumblr.com/post/7294947830). I’ve finally managed to put a name to the bird I thought was a Keri. Or rather, I saw a bunch of birds that clearly were Keri, which caused me to go back to the birding websites and hunt until I found my bird. So here they both are.
Grey-headed Lapwing - Keri (ケリ)
They seem to prefer the...
Matsuri!
I went to a matsuri with a good selection of food stalls, and I’ve posted pics here so that you can salivate.
A matsuri is a Japanese festival. Typically they happen in the summer months, although winter festivals exist too. The biggest ones are sponsored by a city government and can be huge: tens of thousands of attendees, hundreds of food stalls, a parade of giant floats, etc. However,...
Human-powered water pump, from the Middle Ages
Random bit of coolness from the Yaizu Museum: a medieval design for a human-powered water pump, looking sort of like a reverse waterwheel.
Its purpose is to pump water up a short distance. E.g. you have a rice paddy beside a river, but the water level in the river is lower than the paddy, so you use this to fill the paddy. The next picture shows how it looks in action:
When the Japanese decide to build a slide for a children’s park, they don’t mess around.
This is the slide at the Omaezaki Marine Park. It’s ridiculous.
And here’s what the ride down looks like. The noise is me shuffling my feet to increase the speed.
Not something you’re likely to stumble across on a road trip in Canada. We had no idea it was there until we spotted a sign: “Castle, next right, 700 m”. Thank heavens for unplanned diversions!
Wish I could say the colour gradient in the sky actually shifted from blue to white like that, but I think it’s an effect caused by the camera lens.
Birds not-of-the-paddies
During a run along a river down to the ocean I came across this fellow and five of his friends sunning themselves on the concrete embankment. Pretty no, but interesting yes. Just look at those webbed feet. Cormorant in Japanese is umiu or ウミウ. He’s either a Japanese Cormorant or a Great Cormorant.
Bonus picture: A few metres from the cormorants was this duck, looking rather out of...
Birds of the Paddies
One of the things that has fascinated me about the rice paddies is the bird life. The paddies are similar to a kind of marsh land, and support a huge ecosystem of feathered creatures.
Unfortunately there’s no way I can take decent photos of the birds with my little automatic camera, but I’ve noted down what I’ve seen and then found photos online. Thank-you Google Images, plus...
June 2011
15 posts
Rice Update
I know you’ve all been eagerly waiting for an update on the growth of the rice. Here’s what the little seedlings look like now:
When you see a lot of them together, it looks like one of those fractal pictures. What animal is hidden in the image below? Answer: 10,000 frogs.
Actually I have finally managed to see a frog, or at least a tadpole, in the paddies. The egrets run...
Nostalgia in a Grand(om) Way
This post is purely for some ex-teachers from Grandom Sogo-gakuin (Comprehensive Academy), an ESL school where I taught 1996-98.
I was back in Yokohama on a business trip a few weeks ago, and since I was at the station anyway I popped out to see what was left of the school. Well, the building’s still there …
… but the 7th floor looks like it’s occupied by a couple of...
Cult of the Train Driver
Japan’s train system is world-famous, and deserves to be. I don’t think there is any other country in the world with such a well developed urban mass transportation system. Many city dwellers don’t bother with cars because they just aren’t necessary. You can get anywhere you need to go very quickly, albeit not cheaply, by train.
The train drivers are a special breed....
To the Station
To give a flavour of the sights of Japan, here are some of the landmarks on the way from home to the station where I catch the train to Shizuoka City. Usually I bike the 2.5 km route, but recently due to all the rain I’ve been walking.
The local gas station. Regular gas is 150 yen per litre, or about C$ 1.84. You Canadians can stop complaining about your gas prices right about...
Roots of Japanese-ness
I haven’t posted a lot of links to other websites, but this one seems relevant.
In a nutshell: a new study of Japanese dialects suggests the Japanese language emerged about 2,200 years ago. This fits with the timing of the arrival in Japan of the Yayoi people, so likely they brought the language.
The general picture of Japanese pre-history is that the island had been occupied since about...
Japanese Firefighters are Ninjas!
Things I Like About Japan, #7
In a country as disaster-prone as Japan, the firefighters are bound to be superb professionals. They have the training and equipment to respond to almost any scale of disaster, from a house fire to an earthquake.
What I didn’t know, though, is that they’re all ninjas too. I happened to pass by the fire station when they were outside doing training...
WatchJapanese firefighters are ninjas!
Improving Nature With Concrete
Things I Don’t Like About Japan, #1
Here’s a small stream near my in-laws’ house.
And here’s the same stream 50 m to the east.
Notice the difference? They’re working their way upstream cutting down the cherry trees, widening the river, and paving the side of it with concrete bricks.
I suppose this activity is justified for reasons such as flood...
May 2011
18 posts
Seafood!
Things I Like About Japan, #6
The typical Japanese diet includes much more seafood that the western diet. A big part of the reason for that is that seafood is much cheaper here, because the Japanese are willing to eat a much wider variety of fish that we do back home.
In North America my image of seafood is mostly large filets or steaks looking attractive on plates in restaurants, and that...
Accurate weather forecasts
Things I Like About Japan, #5
Back in Vancouver E would constantly complain about the inaccuracy of Vancouver weather forecasts. When you go to sleep they’re predicting rain for the next day, and when you wake up it’s a glorious sunny day. So then they predict sun for the afternoon, and it starts to hail. I always just accepted this. I figured that weather forecasting was an...
Rice seedlings
And this is the close-ups of the rice seedlings before and after planting. I promise this is absolutely the last rice-related post for at least a week or two.
WatchAnd if you like the video of the planting machine at work, this is how they reload it. It looks like the seedlings come in some kind of biodegradable foam mat that gets planted too.
WatchAt the risk of turning this into a blog purely about rice planting, I wanted to share this video of the rice-planting machine at work. Look at those cute little spinning claws injecting the rice seedlings in neat rows.
Growing Rice, Part 1
Due to the surprisingly strong Canadian interest in the rice planting cycle, I’m going to post a few pics of the process so far. The first step seems to be plowing up the ground to turn the soil over. Flocks of little birds called keri follow in the wake of the plow and eat all the yummy worms and things that get turned up. In English the bird is called the gray-headed lapwing, but I think...
