I found Haruhi Suzumiya. She’s working in a popular chain anime goods shop in Osaka’s Nippombashi district. I didn’t plan to find a god-like entity hocking over-priced character goods, but it just sort of worked out that way. Nippombashi has…
Okunoshima: Poison Gas & Bunnies Island
After dragging her through multiple atomic bomb ruined schools and two days of visiting bomb-centric Hiroshima museums I took my lightly traumatized wife to an island full of bunnies to recover. The island had beautiful, natural scenery and uncountable therapeutic…
High Desert Ghost Town: Calico, California
Back in 2017 I brought my wife to California for the first time. She’d traveled outside of Japan before and even had visited Missouri for a wedding, but she’d never been to my home state and it’d been a spell…
A Weekend Getaway in Tsuwano
Tsuwano I’d see the hillside trail, a zigzagging path covered end-to-end by red torii gates the night before. It was lit up by lanterns along the way which in the inky night almost appeared as if floating in the sky,…
It’s the Journey, Not the Destination: SL Yamaguchi
When riding an old steam engine I want to feel like I’m riding in a relic of the past, not just being pulled by it and to get that experience my wife and I boarded SL Yamaguchi. Operating since 1979,…
Building the Record-Breaking Kamikaze
Today the word “kamikaze” will always be associated with the suicidal air (and sea) attacks of World War II, but in 1937 it was the name of a unique record-breaking airplane and my latest modeling project. (I know it’s not…
The Greatest Competition Comes to Sasebo
I have achieved a dream three years in the making. On Dec. 1, 2018 I participated in a competition greater than the Olympics, Daytona 500 and Army/Navy Game combined. I of course speak of the Sasebo Goeikan (Escort Ship) Curry…
Fantastic Steam Engines and Where to Find Them!
How does this sound for a travelogue- Japan on the Go: How the Hell Does a Country the Size of California Have So Many Transportation Museums?! It will be 500+ pages long and be nothing but preserved trains and museums…
Meiji-mura: A Victorian Village in Japan
It was a period of rapid change. Men and women walked in kimono and haikara (high-collar) Western fashions on noisy streets of horses and rail-riding street cars hemmed in by wooden Japanese merchant shops and the latest in English architecture.…
Louisiana in Shizuoka: Reenacting Summer Camp 2018
We may have been in the Japanese Highlands, but it was humid enough to be Louisiana. I was with B Company, 100th Infantry Battalion / 442nd Regimental Combat Team Reenactment Group for the annual summer training and this year’s camp…