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Getting boared in Japan
PICK ALMOST ANY TOPIC as a point of departure for exploring Japan, and it’s a near certainty that a fountain-full of serendipitous discoveries will emerge in short order. Even when the topic is...
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Self-respect
PART TWO of my honeymoon was a visit by my wife and me to my hometown and a few other cities in the United States. (Part One was a trip to Unzen before the eruption.) As we were driving around the...
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Nippon Noel 2009 (3): Straight from Santa’s arbor
IT DOESN’T FEEL like Christmas without the decorations, and Christmas decorations aren’t complete without the most important symbol of the secular festival—trimmed Christmas trees. As a click on the...
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The bogus and the bona fide
I have a sense of mission; that is to serve as a medium in the transient space between life and death conveying the ideas of our ancestors to the people of the future. - Kitahara Kanako DURING HER...
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The bogus and the bona fide (2)
ONLY MAD DOGS and Englishmen venture into India’s noonday sun, it was once said, and the same could apply to Japan in August. Though neither a mad dog nor an Englishman, I was walking on the sunny side...
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Idollatry
HAS THERE EVER been a time when little girls didn’t play with dolls? In Japan, little girls have been playing with paper dolls since at least the Heian period, which began more than 1200 years ago....
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Let the fun and games begin
THERE’S ALWAYS room for more fun in the world, and you can count on the Japanese to be on the lookout for ways to contribute to the world’s fun balance. In particular, they seem to have a flair for...
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Still more true facts
SCROLLING THROUGH the comment section of an American website recently, I read a note in which the author blithely asserted, as if it were common knowledge, that Japanese and Koreans despised each...
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Japan’s cultural kaleidoscope (4)
JUST because the warts of the overseas media and the commentator-bloggers who rely on them think their folderol is insight doesn’t mean you have to fall for it. The national decline of Japan, if it...
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All you have to do is look (14)
The front gate of Kashima High School, in Kashima, Saga. There has been an educational institution on this site since 1669. Kashima High considers its own origins to be a school founded under a...
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All you have to do is look (28)
The O-bon aquatic tug-of-war in Karatsu, Saga, last week. The rope is 35 meters long and 40 centimeters thick. There was also a smaller scale event for 100 children. Toyotomi Hideyoshi came up with...
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All you have to do is look (63)
The Hizen Tanuki Odori, a dance performed at a festival in Kashima, Saga, on the 25th as a thanks for the fall harvest. They’re wearing raccoon masks and have squash gourds suspended between their...
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All you have to do is look (95)
Two miko advertise the start of a morning market on the second and fourth Sundays of the month on Shinbaba-dori in front of the Matsubara Shinto shrine in Saga. It was a bustling shopping district...
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All you have to do is look (98)
Scenes from the Karatsu Kunchi, a three-day festival in Saga that ended yesterday. Men dressed as firefighters during the Edo period pull 14 floats through the city streets to the accompaniment of...
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All you have to do is look (127)
A group of 33 figurines of the Buddha in Ushizu, Saga, dating from the Edo period. I could not find an explanation for the bibs.
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