The Bridge to Heaven
One thing we’ve noticed about the Japanese: they can be frightfully competitive with one another. All over the country even the most humble of prefectures must claim to be the biggest/fastest/strongest/best in something, whether that’s soba making or sake brewing or rice growing etc and so on. But one thing we’ve noticed is that nowhere ...
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The Light Fantastic
Light is a funny old thing. For around 25 years, I stumbled around with only a cursory concept of it: sometimes it was there, sometimes it was not; sometimes there was too much of it, sometimes not enough. I think this is how a lot of people are with light: they are aware of it, ...
Back to the Wild
Travelling as native English speakers we’ve found our mother tongues getting progressively worse. A sentence like: “Mum and dad’s garden became bigger over the years,” can devolve to something clunky like: “The garden of my mother and father has become more big.” It’s part of making yourself more understood, but when you suddenly bump into ...
Ready? Go! and Rock Wishes
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve written: “[thing] wasn’t actually invented in Japan, but arrived from China” or words to that effect. This morning we discovered another one, an ancient Asian board game that was first known as weiqi (in China), then baduk (in Korea) or and finally go (Japan). The rules seem ...
The Place Where Gods Are Born
Earlier this year we spent seven weeks in America. This was a typical conversation: “Where y’all from?” “Scotland.” “Oh I’m Scottish.” “Really? Where were you born?” “Arizona, but my great, great grandmother on my father’s side was from Elgin.” “Right.” There’s something nice about it, though, the North American obsession over tracing routes. It doesn’t ...
Under the Sea (Well, Almost)
“I tell you I was born on the seashore! I bathed in the waters of the sea! It gave me food and it gave me peace, and its fascinating distances fed my dreams… I have to smile for the salt of the sea is in my blood, and there may be ten thousand roads over ...
The Living Island – Part One
“Write about what you know,” they say. No one’s above doing that – Hemingway did it; so did Tolstoy and Joyce. Hell, at one time or another, most of the good old boys cannibalised their own lives for their art, and it turns out that Studio Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki has done it too. Given ...
The Children of the Volcano
Approximately 92,800 years ago: homo sapiens and Neanderthals coexist; Mammoths walk the Earth; people still use CDs; and the island of Kyushu is being ripped asunder by the eruption of Mount Aso. It had already been exploding on and off for two hundred thousand years, but this was the big one: the mountain unleashed such ...
On Yer Bike!
There isn’t too much we’d change about Japanese society, but we’d definitely have more hand driers in public toilets. We’d improve the woeful lack of bins too: we’ve walked around for hours at a time desperately searching for somewhere to dump our litter (although that at least has some mitigating circumstances). Natto would go, obviously. ...
Bridge Over Troubled Water
Dizzy. I’m so dizzy, my head is spinning… But this whirlpool does end. A little too quickly, in fact. Forty-one metres below us in the Naruto Narrows dozens of little whirlpools are forming and collapsing, like a swarm of small hurricanes. They’re caused by a drop in water level that surges as the tide goes ...