A Happy Monday
They say prefecture 46, Fukui, is the happiest in Japan. If that’s the case, then it’s true in spite of the weather. Winter here consists of snow, sleet, hail and rain, usually within a few minutes of each other. Still, the people are happy – it’s a very different place in summer, apparently. Historically, though, ...
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The Fairytale Teller
We got off the train in Matsue and winter was waiting for us. Not the fun winter of snow, steamy breath on the still air and mass conviviality. No, this is not a Hollywood winter – this is the brutal winter of the real world, and it has not come to play. Instead, it brings ...
A History of Violence
It’s not all cartoon pufferfish in Shimonoseki. It’s position on the western tip of Honshu has meant that it’s seen more than its fair share of extraordinary events over the years. Battle of Dan-no-Ura, 1185 There’s an old piece of Scottish wisdom that says it is impossible to push your grandmother from large public ...
Tale of Two Castles
According to our copy of the Lonely Planet, there’s a school of thought that believes that America deliberately left Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, open to attack in order to draw the country into the Second World War. Obviously as uneducated travel volunteers we’ve no idea if that’s true, but it’s an interesting perspective – and one ...
Isolation and The Last Samurai
At the start of the 17th century, with the commencement of the Edo Period, Japan decided it didn’t want foreign friends any more. Citing moral decline, the arrival of alien religions and the wicked vices of the wider world, it closed its doors and entered a period of self-isolation known as Sakoku. In the bustling ...
Battleship Island
Hashima – or Battleship Island – lying just outside the bay of Nagasaki was, for almost 90 years, a bustling coal mining community. The entire place was owned by the Mitsubishi company, who used every scrap of land to house employees, offices and mining facilities in a concrete fortress in the middle of the sea. ...
There is a Light and it Never Goes Out
My grandfather was in it from the very start – he lied about his age so he could join up. His first missions came on the notorious North Atlantic convoys, when British ships would navigate icy North Sea to sneak past German forces and deliver supplies to the Soviets. My grandfather was 15 years old, ...
For Relaxing Times…
They say in the original Gaelic it means “water of life” but in most of my experiences it’s had the opposite effect. I first tried whisky at the age of 11 during a family holiday to the Scottish Highlands. We’d visited a distillery and had a tasting at the end, during which my father snuck ...
Enter The Shadow Warriors
There’s a legend based in my part of Scotland. It tells the story of Sawney Bean, a cave-dwelling cannibal who, along with his incestuous brood, would rob and eat unfortunate travellers. The Beans, of whom there were said to be several dozen, would overwhelm the innocent passers-by before dragging them off to their dark lair. ...
A Blessing And A Verse
Because of a defective part of my brain, and because studying English literature largely removes the fun from reading, I don’t like poetry. That’s a pretty sweeping statement, and of course not true in every case, but for the most part it just doesn’t grab me. I don’t see poetry as more layered than, say, ...