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.