Japan
Katsushika HokusaiOne of the programs our video recorder grabs when convenient is Great Railway Journeys. The most-recent episode was about Japan, but the railways seem to be of secondary importance. I used to think that Japan might be a nice place to live, but I've changed my mind. It seems grittier, more severe than on my visits (1975 and 1981?). "Fishing by numbers" was a dismal sight. Families rent a time slot on a(n architected) stream bank to go fishing. Everyone catches something, and everyone goes home "happy". I don't know how I would deal with living someplace that dense. And economic pressures are making rural ways of life less and less viable.
There was a visit to the Nagasaki atom-bomb memorial, and while the A-bombs were a terrible thing, the exhibits made no mention of why America was at war with Japan. Then there was a visit to a museum (reached by train) for the Kamakaze, again ignoring how such a desperate situation came to be. I guess the Japanese are just as good at ignoring inconvenient historical facts as Americans are. (Our present-day politics seems to be all about ignoring facts.)
The show talked about individualism, pollution, recession, poetry, manners, earthquakes; but it did include a ride on the world's fastest train (300 km/hr (186 mph)), and a shot of the Japanese Mag-Lev - 500 km/hr (310 mph). (Hmmm, I wonder how long ago this show was made. Says © BBC North MCMXCIX (1999), but in 1990 a French TGV did 515.3 km/h (321 mph), without mag-lev.)
Interesting tidbit - a volcano expert tells us that when fleeing an eruption, we should run backwards, so we can watch for flying rocks and dodge them. (Apparently that's the greatest danger from Mt Aso.)