Last week I saw an article about snake people moving to dying Japanese mountain towns. It seems a bit overstated--I mean, how many rural mountain towns can sustain an economy on brewpubs, artist communes, or drone testing--but I love the idea, especially in spring or fall, when the sakura or the momiji are in bloom and I really miss Japan ( Read more... )

One benefit of staying in a ryokan is that you get both dinner and breakfast, so after sleeping in almost until the last minute, I was awakened by softlykarou with exactly enough time to make it to breakfast after a quick shower. And such a breakfast:


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I came on this article about the depopulation of Japan's countryside yesterday, even to the point of relatives moving their ancestors' remains to the cities where they have all moved to find work. The main part that drew my attention is the mention that the author lives on an island in the 瀬戸内海 (setonaikai, "Seto Inland Sea") the sea between three ( Read more... )

Shopping Center Thanks
Thanks was built back when the City University of New York had a branch in Chiyoda, and it managed to survive the closure of that university four years later by being the place where the surrounding even smaller towns, like Oasa or Geihoku, came to get goods. We went there a lot, because while it was primarily a grocery store ( Read more... )

Walking Path
This is shown from pretty near our house. If you turn the view around and go down the road a ways, you'll be able to see it on the left. And you should probably turn the view around at least a bit, because this section of road's pictures were taken in fall and the trees are great. The momiji especially are spectacularThis is the road ( Read more... )

I've wanted to make a post like this for a while, but I've always been stymied before because I didn't think of using my phone to take pictures everywhere until about halfway through my time living in Japan, and even then I didn't typically take pictures of daily life. Everything you do all the time seems ordinary even if other people wouldn't ( Read more... )

In what's apparently becoming a yearly tradition for us, softlykarou and I went out to the suburbs to visit my parents and go to the Scarecrow Festival. Much (maybe even most) of our visit was taken up by softlykarou and I looking around St. Charles and Geneva antique shops for either a coatrack or a kitchen sideboard, and we didn't find either of those, but we find a ( Read more... )

The first weekend in December was the JLPT/日本語能力試験, which was filled with just as much bullshit as I expected it to be. softlykarou and I took level 4, which we figured that living in Japan for three years would be able to prepare us for. And it...kind of was, in a sense. Our lack of formal schooling (well, mine, softlykarou did take some classes at university) was a ( Read more... )

Click here and go to satellite view. That's our house!

And yes, all those fields visible on the view are rice fields.

So, we were planning on going to kaitenzushi for my birthday, but it never actually happened because it was closed. Why, I have no idea. The hours on the door said that it was open from 1100 to 2100. There was a paper taped to the inside of the door, with something on it about May 25 and a bunch of other kanji I couldn't read that might have ( Read more... )