what do you see?

Japanese cities are usually relatively quiet and peaceful. Amazingly so, considering the density of housing - at night in the summer when windows are open, you harldy hear a sound from the nieghbours. But conversely, there seem to be very weak laws about when noisy demolition work can be done. They started clawing down an old house about a block from here at 7:00am today. 7:00am!! I suppose that's the time good citizens should be up and about, but come on!

I saw this in a vending machine tonight, and thought of you...




In fact, it's not a new kind of drink but actually a glass jar of mini-kitkats...see:



It's not particulary common to find food in vending machines here, contrary to the image a lot of people have. And what could be better than chilled chocolate on a windy July evening!

It's a dark and gloomy morning here; it feels like dawn although it's after 10 already. Very rainy and a little windy, the effects of a smallish typhoon currently brushing the side of Hokkaido as it goes off to the northeast.

The new E-Square web-site is now online!! See http://www.esquare-japan.com
It's done, although not fully dusted...I'll be tweaking and adding some more info and images soon but it's all working now. A minor problem in Firefox with the top bar but will do that too, oh so soon.

There'll be some new features in the future to watch out for too!

I've put some new pictures on Flickr - a new set of our trip to Hakodate, and some fireworks from Sapporo on Friday night...this page is probably the best one to start from.

A man-made cloud hangs over the city after the fireworks display last Friday... 

Well things are happening at the moment...there was quite a big earthquake in Tokyo this afternoon. I heard about it by chance as I just happened to be texting a friend there. She said the trains had all been stopped, as had lifts etc. It was a 5 on the Japanese scale, anywhere up to 6 on the richter scale (depending which website you check...Japantoday's report is here)

At the time we were enjoying one of the Odori beer gardens, which opened on Thursday. We even had the unexpected pleasure of seeing a celebrity: former pro-wrestler Heigo "Animal" Hamaguchi, appearing in the upper window of the STV pre-fab building and being interviewed (for a bit too long perhaps) by a woman in a yukata. Everyone seemed to appreciate it though, and were eagerly taking pictures and cheering along with his gruff chants. The only information I could find about him on the web includes a rather old picture of him, for example this site.

Not again. Poor old London. You know it's going to be bad news when CNN starts their wall-to-wall repeating of information and NHK starts rebroadcasting whole chunks of BBC News 24.
At least it wasn't worse. I hope everyone's not too disrupted over there, I'm still thinking of you.

Argh, long gap. Sorry. We went away again, this time to Hakodate for a couple of nights. Relaxing!
But very busy since we got back on Tuesday, hence no time for blogging. I will catch up on Saturday, and post some pictures too.
I hope everyone is OK.

Well if it happened as ART said, which wasn't made clear on the BBC site, then I understand and take back what I said and instead criticise the media for writing an inappropriately provoking story! See what happens when you get into writing about stuff like this...

Today I'll just stick to saying it's warm again here finally, in fact at the moment it's still very mild and still. About 24 degrees C according to my trusty "woody thermometer". I've just made a vinaigrette in a Ziploc(TM) bag, hoping that's a good substitute for the usual jar with a tight fitting lid and won't spray oily dressing everywhere when I try to shake it up. That would be very unfortunate but probably not surprising given my track-record.

Well the wall-to-wall coverage of London on CNN has dropped off now, I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not. Anyway it's amazing how quickly other events can overtake the news. I suppose it's just the way it is; there are always things happening in the world, good and bad which should be reported. This thing happened in London, so I feel affected by it personally - it's somewhere I know so well. I was 6000 miles away when it happened though, so I feel almost guilty to not have been nearer it, if that makes any sense at all.

I'm glad at least that the US army lifted their ban on soldiers travelling into London. Reading the initial story yesterday after the ban had been put into place, it seemed almost too ironic that a quote from George Bush ("In this difficult hour, the people of Great Britain can know the American people stand with you") was printed alongside...

Anyway, this kind of writing is not my usual style on this blog. But I think this is as good a time as any to air my feelings. News of Japan-life going on as always just isn't important.

Thanks for the comments everyone. And I agree with SJT- the connecting with culture's thoughts on the events of the last week are very helpful. Follow my link above if you want to read it.

Re. our trip to Aomori, I still haven't written anything about it, but I've put a few pictures on Flickr (which I've finally got round to using) - see this page for the relevant batch. I'm going to transfer the other photoalbums over sooner or later too.

There's not much to say about what happened in London except that I'm thinking of everyone over there, especially people working and living in the city. Take care.

I went to one of the film festival shows yesterday, the Australian collection. Some good films and quite varied in content, including a couple of documentaries. One of them was called The Arborsmith. It was about a guy who grows trees into furniture and things - it takes years to do. He has a website with some interesting pictures.
There was also a Japanese/Australian co-production made in Sapporo which was good. It was nice to see places like the university campus and Susukino on the big screen.

To explain about the slight gap, we went to Aomori prefecture for two nights, the first of a couple of short holidays we're taking as we don't have time for a longer break this summer. I'll tell you about it later.

This week, the 7th international Short Shorts film festival is in Sapporo - it's quite a big thing really, so I'm a bit surprised but pleased that it comes here! I'm going to watch one of the programmes later today, and hopefully we'll go and see another one together later in the week. There's a page in Japanese about the Sapporo part of the festival here, and that also links to a bilingual site about the festival in Japan as a whole.

Just about all the shops started their summer bargain sales today as it's July 1st. And the beer garden outside the Park Hotel opened tonight too; a nice place to relax after work although it's only open until about 9pm.