It had taken nearly seven hours but we made it. The first express train took us from Abashiri on Hokkaido’s far northern coast through five hours of its national park-like interior of forests and plains, or at least that’s what…
Unzen Kanoukaen: Samurai and Sakura Blossoms by Torchlight
Hundred of burning torches moved as a river of flames advancing through the black near-moonless night. Under glowing torchlight a hundred samurai in full armor, sword at the hip, their faces and armor illuminated by only their burning fires proceeded…
Doing Hard Time in Abashiri: Abashiri Prison Museum
This story begins not with a prison but a road. Hokkaido is Japan’s Alaska and Old West combined. In the 1800s this massive, harsh land was sparsely populated and rich in resources waiting to be exploited. Japan needed pioneers to…
How the North was Won: Hokkaido 2019
We began this year with a trip to a place I’d never thought my sub-tropical wife would willingly visit in the dead of winter: Hokkaido. Hokkaido is Japan’s northernmost main island; its last domestic frontier. Previously known as Ezo, Japan…
Ryukoji – Buddhist History in Fujisawa
If you travel to Katase-Enoshima station, near the beaches in southern Fujisawa, you might see the top of a pagoda peaking above the trees on a nearby hillside. Ryukoji is not a large temple, especially compared to the sprawling…
Saturday in Den Den Town
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…
A visit to the Nogeyama Zoo
In the hills of Yokohama, not terribly far from the skyscrapers, shopping malls, and night life of Sakuraigicho and Kannai, there is a large hilltop park in a quiet neighborhood called Nogeyama. Large parks in Yokohama are not all that…
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…
Japan’s Unchanging Schools
Think back to when you were young. Did you ever go, perhaps with family or as a school trip, to visit a school from a previous era? I can think of a few times when I was a kid that…