Another Mountain

Last night I dreamt Sylvester McCoy was my uncle and he was taking me on a tour of New York City. I suppose it's because McCoy's birthday was recently and I was admiring New York in Only Murders in the Building.

Yesterday, the last day of August, I decided to go up Mount Amanokagu, one of the three famous mountains of Kashihara, the Yamato Sanzan.

So now I've been up all three, though it's been a year or two since I went up Miminashi. Maybe I'll go again this weekend. Here's a map at Amanokagu showing the three mountains:

The grid shows Fujiwara City, the capital of Japan from 694 to 710, with Fujiwara Palace being the dark square in the middle.

Amanokagu is 500 feet tall, smaller than Unebi but a little taller than Miminashi, which surprised me. I felt like I got to the top of Amanokagu much faster.

There was a little shrine at the top. I saw a guy there with a big green bug net. A popular summer activity in Japan is bug catching. There's also an insect museum near Amanokagu. I think I had my fill of gnats yesterday but I was heartened to see plenty of spider webs.

Here's Mount Unebi from Amanokagu:

Here's Miminashi:

My glamorous selfie:

The Streets that Spawned Street Fighter

Behold, it is Ryu, now in bronze, reserved for an eternity of admiration. And he's here, in Kashihara, part of a collaboration between the city and Capcom, the company that produced the Street Fighter video game series. From the web site:

Capcom Co., Ltd. (Capcom) today announced that it entered into a Comprehensive Agreement to Promote the Vitalization of the Local Economy with Kashihara City (Nara Prefecture) on Tuesday, August 30, 2022, under which it will utilize its popular Street Fighter series with the aim of bolstering tourism and other local revitalization efforts.

Capcom supports regional revitalization efforts throughout Japan by leveraging the power of its brands to engage people in four areas: Economic Development, Cultural Awareness, Prevention Education and Election Participation. The company has carried out various activities since 2009, such as concluding the first comprehensive agreement between a video game company and a local government body, collaborating with police in a number of prefectures on prevention activities, and working to raise awareness of gubernatorial elections.

That's the official story. There may be more to it. Last year, I started seeing these posters everywhere at the various junior high schools where I work:

One of the teachers I worked with is married to a guy who works at Capcom so I asked her about it. She said that one of the creators of Street Fighter is from Kashihara. So I guess, in a sense, this really is Ryu's hometown. お邪魔します、リュウ先生！ It's cool and I am a Street Fighter fan but, of course, I always used Chun-li. In addition to the fact that she's better looking, she also has that really useful downward kick and the ability to bat-jump off the side of the screen. True, she was vulnerable to uppercuts but that downward kick was a lot easier to pull off than any of the uppercut moves so I generally didn't have to worry about them if I was fighting against a human opponent.

Monday Morning Snow

Yesterday's Christmas miracle was the most snow I've seen in Kashihara since I moved here in 2020.

It was all melted and gone by the afternoon but it was cool while it lasted.

When I arrived at school, after a train journey and a walk through snow covered rice fields, the kids were making snowballs and running around with them.

Yesterday was my last day for a while at my current junior high school. We had a Christmas party in the English club. The kids played Christmas songs on the piano, recited "A Visit from Saint Nicholas", exchanged treats, and played Dungeons and Dragons.

It's a shame it was our last session. After a battle with Draconians on a bridge, I really felt like they were getting into the spirit of the thing.

No snow to-day, which is good for my laundry hanging out on the line, but I'm hoping it comes again later this week. Saturday or Sunday would be nice, or so I heard from Bing Crosby.

Eager Trees and Turtles

Spring isn't quite in full bloom here in Kashihara, Japan, but some of the trees have jumped the gun. Also, the annual Turtlepocalypse is here.

The really big birds are back, too. Here one soars over a freshly tilled rice field with Mount Unebi in the distance:

And now a conundrum:

The soccer ball, the orange, or the heron? You must choose.

Someone bade goodbye to winter by tying their scarf to a tree:

Finally, here's some Hiroshima style okanomiyaki I had for lunch a couple weeks ago with my friend, Rizu. Mine was squid, hers was pork.

The whole shiny black surface is a stovetop and the okanomiyaki cooks as long as you want it to.

Japan Continued

My little winter vacation is coming to an end and I'm feeling especially lazy to-day. So here are some pictures that have accumulated on my camera over the past week.

I did go back to Kashiharajingu and was it ever packed.

Covid numbers have been very low in Japan lately and I guess everyone was itching to get back to the normal New Year's temple visit.

Aside from the temple that day, I haven't been getting out much for this vacation. I worked on my comic, though not as much as I'd have liked because I didn't have tracing paper. I'd taken my pad of tracing paper to work a few weeks ago and it rained when I walked home. The whole pad of paper got warped. So on Monday I journeyed to the one place I around here I knew of where I could get some more, a shop called Stationery Club, five train stations north of me and a bit of a walk. As I was leaving the train station, I ran into some second year students from the school where I'm currently working (so they're around 14 years old). Two boys and one girl. They were all eating karaage, Japanese style fried chicken, and walking to Twin Gate. Looks like the Japanese taboo against walking and eating at the same time is dying. They told me they were going bowling. Twin Gate has bowling, darts, video games, slot machines, a movie theatre, a comics shop, and I think pachinko. I was advised never to go into pachinko parlours so I can look like an upstanding citizen. I hate gambling anyway so that's one piece of advice I don't mind following.

Stationery Club was closed so I dropped by Twin Gate on the walk back to have a look around. I ran into a group of high school boys who'd graduated from one of the junior high schools I'd worked at last year. I remember them as a mischievous bunch and I was happy to see them there, hanging out in front of the ice cream shop, posturing like gangsters. The ice cream shop was closed, too, and one of the guys informed me that it was closed until January 4th. Not everything was closed, though. I had a look around the arcade which was equally divided between video games and gambling machines. I didn't see pachinko in there so hopefully my reputation won't suffer. I certainly didn't play anything. I wouldn't have unless I saw a little Black Lodge floating above a machine.

In a lot near the Twin Gate there are these statues I first noticed some time ago:

I walked onto the lot and found this strange but sort of inconspicuous storefront near the back:

Inside was anything but inconspicuous. A used goods shop, it was filled with books, clothes, video games, jewellery, CDs, movies, gaming systems, swords, and guns. Lots of guns. Various handguns and rifles. Japanese gun laws are pretty strict yet here was this arsenal a few feet away from stacks of video games. Gun crime in Japan isn't close to what it is in the U.S., though, so they must be doing something right.

The place also had David Bowie's Outside album in a special two disk version for only 750 yen (around $7.50). I might go back for that.

Frogs and Flowers

I was walking with a favourite student yesterday when she ran across one of the little canals in the neighbourhood and picked this higanbana for me. "But isn't it dangerous?" I asked in Japanese. "Poisonous," she said in English and I was just so happy she knew the word "poisonous".

Higanbana blooms in autumn and it's one of the many signs of the incoming season. The rice is getting tall, too.

This year, the rice fields seem to be overflowing with frogs.

I'm also seeing a lot of butterflies or moths lately, different from the ones I see in spring.

And this is a turtle and two ducks who aren't speaking to each other.

Aging with Japan

My birthday yesterday turned out to be pretty great for unanticipated reasons. An elementary school teacher I'd met a few days earlier invited me to join him, his daughter, and his friend for lunch. We ended up in the Imai area of Kashihara which dates back to the 1500s.

My new friend introduced me to the proprietors of shops where sake, soy sauce, and pickled vegetables are made (I bought a bottle of soy sauce). Here's an ancient sake brewing counter:

Outside the shop, plants are hung to advertise the age of the current batch of sake.

If this plant had been green, it would have meant the sake was very new.

We stopped at a Shinto shrine where they taught me the proper way to enter and exit through the torii gate and how to ring the bell and bow.

Afterwards, we stopped at an incongruously chic smoothie bar and had "art smoothies".

I said the place seemed very much like L.A.

Before going to the Imai area, we stopped at a curry restaurant and a pizza restaurant. The pizza place had a great atmosphere and an enormous brick oven. The pizza crust was fantastic. We also had some great steamed bamboo.

The owner of the restaurant invited us to pick our own herbs from his garden. My friend and his daughter chose some sansho leaves:

All in all, a pretty good birthday for me--and I didn't even tell them it was my birthday until the end of it. Sometimes you just get lucky.

It can Always Snow

Some heavy snowflakes were falling quickly and copiously this morning at Yamato Yagi station. Still not enough to make it pile up.

It'd actually been getting pretty warm around here, up to 20 Celsius on the weekend. And it'll warm up again this coming weekend, I hope I can take the whiplash and enjoy those blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way (as David Lynch would say).

Last Friday I went up the mountain, Mount Miminashi, again after work. Here are some pictures:

Cold Chicken Feathers

I guess I didn't need to go all the way to Shiga to see snow because we had plenty right here in Kashihara this morning.

Though, sadly, it didn't pile up. Despite the fact that the snowflakes were as big as chicken feathers and it snowed non-stop for over four hours there was almost no sign it'd snowed less than an hour after it stopped. Even these rice fields were all but clear of snow an hour after it stopped.

That's the view from a fourth floor classroom of the school where I'm working now.

So, yes, it's been cold around here lately. A few days ago, I took my hand out of some hot water and noticed steam coming off my fingers that looked like smoke.

I was reminded of the Beast's claws smoking from the hot blood of a recent kill in Jean Cocteau's Belle et la Bete.

I guess it wasn't so far fetched after all.