Plus One
Of course it was never just 100 days – always there was the +1. To fulfil this final duty in Miyagi, we decided to dodge the needless flying, skip the indirect trains, and drive a bus all the way from Kanazawa, straight to Ishinomaki. It wasn’t the quickest way to do things, but for Katy and ...
50 Things We’ve Learned in 50 Days
Today was unfortunately a bit of a wash out in Wakayama prefecture. The seasonal gloom made pictures pretty hard and created a strangely flat feeling to mark what has been an amazing 50 days so far. So rather than try to scrape butter over too much bread with what happened today, we thought we’d bring ...
The Fear Factor
Anyone who’s ever travelled to a UNESCO World Heritage site knows the feeling – hell, anyone who’s ever been to any tourist attraction of any note knows the feeling. Just for a second, you wish you could have the place all to yourself. But you can’t, because the world is overpopulated, the number of tourist ...
Six Months Later – Part Two
At 2.46pm on 11th March, about half a minute into the earthquake, Yoko Matsumoto was evacuated from the third floor of her office block and into a public park with hundreds of other people in central Sendai. The world shook for another 90 seconds, glass cracking, pavements rupturing. Soon a tsunami warning would ring out. ...
Six Months Later – Part One
Six months ago, my friend, mentor and sometime drinking partner Stephen Phelan stood where I am standing now. That day in Onagawa the view was not pretty. “In the middle of town, near the seafront,a few buildings remained upright, though stripped down to red metal frames and loose hanging wires,” he wrote in a piece ...