上高地河童橋ライブカメラ Kamikochi Kappa-Bashi Live Streaming Camera
Never been to Japan? How do you visualize it?
I know that I used to think ‘Tokyo’.
Lots of buildings, cement, gaudy lights, flat-panel displays, high-tech dazzle.
The truth is that 70% of Japan is covered with forests.
As I describe in my book LIVE FROM JAPAN! and make vividly apparent with over 450 photos, my Japan is beautiful green fields of rice, soybeans, and many other vegetables, flowering and fruit trees, domesticated and occasional wild animals — monkeys, foxes, ferrets, raccoons, wild boar, even bears — countless varieties of birds.
But proof positive from my camping trip last week, after living here for almost 13 years, I still haven’t seen it all. Every time I venture into a new area of this relatively small country, I’m astonished by some side of Japan I couldn’t have imagined.
My wife and I just spent three days in the “Japanese Alps” — Kamikochi — a mountainous region in Nagano Prefecture. We hiked, checked out the scenery, breathed the refreshing clean mountain air, viewed the deep blue of a sky that is only rivaled by perhaps the Swiss Alps or the rich azure we experienced in Leh, Ladakh (northern India) some years back.
Words completely fail to capture the beauty of Kamikochi. So feast your eyes on some pics!
There’s a whole chapter in my book, LIVE FROM JAPAN!, devoted to Japan’s highway service areas. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, these are the equivalent to what we in the U.S. call ‘rest areas’. They provide a place during a long drive on a highway to pull off the road, stop, stretch your legs, go to the restroom, and for those which have the facilities, to buy some snacks and refreshments.
While functionally they are the same, Japan takes this convenience to a whole different level. Many highway service areas here are mini-malls! I have examples in my book of some typical ones to illustrate how elaborate and well-equipped they usually are.
Having said that, this past weekend my wife and I stopped at one on our way to camping in the Japanese Alps, which was really over the top!
Of course, it had the usual amenities: a restaurant, food court, fast food and ice cream stands, a souvenir shop, vending machines, beautiful clean restrooms.
However, on the inside court it was a spectacularly different story. Inside there was a small but adequate water playground!
This was not a paid admissions theme park. It was free and provided fountains and pools for the whole family to splash around and enjoy. Since this entire summer has been a real scorcher, I can’t overstate how welcome this surprise feature was for everyone stopping by this aptly named ‘highway oasis’.
What can I say? Japan goes out of its way to make life a pleasant adventure for everyone. Too bad this highway service area is not next to my house. Or I could be splashing around in the fountains every day to keep cool!
I noticed right away how totally different Japanese kids are from what I was familiar with in the West. For starters, while middle class moms in the U.S. cart their children in SUVs to school then back home, early in the morning and late in the afternoon, hundreds of uniformed students flood the streets on bicycles here. Weather makes no difference. Sunshine or rain or snow, they’re out en masse. It’s an impressive sight!
Haruka Yoshitake just before she left to attend university in Canada.
During the stretch of my first major stay in Japan, I taught English for a year at all levels, from youngsters to adults over eighty. My two youngest students were four. Both of them were, by the way, absolutely brilliant. I also had other kids from six years of age up through high school. Three of my high school seniors were doing their last bit of cramming before entering college the following year. One went on to attend University of Winnipeg, majoring in International Development and Conflict Resolutions.
There are a hundred ways I could write about the kids here. But I’m going to focus on only elementary school students and one very particular aspect of their education, because it so perfectly illustrates the overall relationship between students and their schools, their teachers, adults and other authority figures, their communities, and most important of all, to one another. It is extremely revealing why Japanese are so obsessively considerate of others and so community-minded, later in life. It also is illustrative of the extremely high dietary standards and nutritional awareness of Japanese society.
We’ll be looking at the preparation of food and participation by students in typical schools here in Hyogo Prefecture. My wife Masumi is a music teacher for an elementary school in Inagawa, and turned me on to what you’re about to watch. Yes, she has confirmed: This is exactly what’s it’s like for young folks attending school across all of Japan. Here we go!
Now I don’t know if fresh meals, made from scratch, are common in America. I’m decades beyond any first-hand knowledge of what goes on there. All I know is that for the 12 years I attended Catholic and public schools, I carried my lunch to school from home, meaning over 2,400 times, I ate a nutritionally-questionable peanut-butter-and-jelly or bologna sandwich and a box of Sun-Made Raisins out of a paper sack, accompanied on special occasions with an apple or banana. Hopefully, things have improved.
By the way, ‘itadakimasu’ [頂きます= ‘let’s eat’] and ‘gochisousamadeshita’ [ごちそうさまでした = ‘thank you for the meal’] is what Masumi and I say before and after every meal.
I love this next video!
Notice the extensive use of masks and this was six years ago, pre-coronavirus. Japanese are very vigilant about hygiene and preventing contamination. Drooling, dribbling, sneezing, or in any way oozing into shared food is highly frowned upon.
The comments for these videos on YouTube are inspiring and thought-provoking. They point to a lot of the things I myself find truly remarkable about the participation and general attitude of the kids. Again, Masumi validated what you see. For example, cleaning the classrooms is a DAILY ritual. The students even do bathroom duty. Masumi told me that there are a few kids in her school who aren’t very academically gifted, or simply don’t particularly like the formal schoolwork, but they LOVE all the extra work duties. It makes them feel like they are part of something, making a contribution, accepted and appreciated by their peers. By helping with the upkeep, the students feel they have a stake in keeping the school clean and functional. They learn respect for property, how to work cooperatively for the good of all, the value of being a member of a team, and develop a sense of duty and responsibility. I suspect they feel that the school is in some sense “theirs”, not just some government building.
Anyone reading this who lives in the U.S. will have to help me out here. I frankly can’t imagine kids there, maybe less so the parents, going along with this. I can imagine heated complaints to the board of education: “I’m not sending my kid to school to wait on tables or become a janitor. What’s going on here?” Maybe I’m wrong and things have changed dramatically since I left. I’d love to know what you folks think of all of what you’ve seen here and how it compares to things back there in the homeland.
What I do know is what I’ve shared in other similar essays about Japan in my new book, LIVE FROM JAPAN! and on this website. And that is, Japan has practically no crime, the people are so honest here I still find it difficult to process, the young folks are friendly and polite — I’m constantly bombarded with greetings and smiles when I ride my bike and pass them in the street either playing or coming from school — and this is by far the safest, most civilized country I’ve ever been in. I can’t help but believe all of this starts right there in those classrooms, where beyond formal education there’s much thoughtful attention devoted to forming good character, developing respect for property, learning to work with others, and always giving your best to whatever you do — even wiping floors.
[ If you like this article and others like it here at this site, please check out my full-color book LIVE FROM JAPAN!, available both in print and as an ebook. With over 450 photos, and 63 anecdotes, it’s getting excellent ratings and reviews. The EPUB ebook available from Apple, B&N and many other booksellers, and of course the deluxe print version, all look fantastic. But the Kindle version from Amazon isn’t so great (they did a very bad job rendering the photos). Amazon really compromised the quality of this beautiful book, so I’m just giving you fair warning. Enjoy! Please leave a review.
And one last thing: If you’re really broke and can’t afford to buy this book, I’ve never turned anyone away. I can send you a PDF and you can send me a smile. ]
Dedicated campaigning billboard in front of our local community center.
We have local elections coming up soon here in town. This reminds me of just how unique and charming campaigning is out here in the countryside of Japan.
There’s nothing arms-length about the way political candidates reach the people. They’re right out on the streets, cruising through neighborhoods, pumping out their message from loudspeakers on mobile campaign centers on wheels, they’re on the sides of the road, on the sidewalks.
Check out this video!
Okay, it’s not quite as exciting as this . . .
At the same time, it seems to work. At least government on a local level does a great job and I find living here extremely comfortable. Everything works the way we hope it would. Considering how meticulous Japanese people are about doing a good job, this is hardly a surprise. Whether it’s planting soybeans, installing a new sidewalk, delivering the mail, making pastries, whatever, the dedication to detail and precision is breathtaking!
I can’t say I really understand what monumental issues might be in play in these local elections. But there’s no shortage of interest from individuals who want the responsibility of running things. This guy seemed to be everywhere . . .
I wonder if he got elected.
As most of you may know, I’m quite immersed in the political struggles of my native country, which in many ways seems to be in decline, and one reason for these ‘Life In Japan’ stories and my book LIVE FROM JAPAN! is to take a break from the frustration and hopelessness of political talk. At the same time, to be a part of society requires paying attention to what’s going on. And respecting the effort that goes into making sure that the public gets the service it wants and deserves.
Japan is a democratic country and that is an intrinsic part of life here. Now if they could just get the U.S. to remove all those bases in Okinawa and the rest of the country!
This past weekend, I had the pleasure of going to the Laugh & Peace Art Gallery in Osaka, to see a selection of works by Enna Yamashiro.
She is a TV star, one of the regular travel guides appearing every Saturday morning at 9:00 am on Travel Salad, taking viewers to a host of other countries. What makes her contribution to the globe-trotting adventures is her paintings. Wherever she lands, she spontaneously renders her impression of the place, often on a computer tablet. A few we had seen on television were on display.
Yamashiro-san’s style is unique but at the same time eminently Japanese. I don’t mean in a traditional sense. Her approach is extremely modern. But her works reflect the aesthetics of both Japanese art and culture: simple, minimalistic, elegant, starkly beautiful. I especially love her sense of color.
Rather than an artist, she calls herself an illustrator. I’ll accept that. She still creates art. I’m sure she’d love for you to visit her website!
Killer bees will overwhelm us and end the human race!
Believe it?
There’s a perfect parallel here. This ridiculous scare headline is on a par with the coronavirus panic that’s been manufactured by a new set of bedfellows writhing in a clusterf*ck of hypocrisy and deception: power-hungry government autocrats, the pharmaceutical industry, compromised agencies of the United Nations, a mega-wealthy computer industry mediocrity claiming divine expertise in medical matters, technocratic futurists who hope to game a paradigm-shift — a reset — into global social control, and the usual court jesters and sycophants who inject their mercenary amorality into any opportunity to make a buck.
Protective wear should be worn 24 hoursa day, even while sleeping. Killer bees, like surveillance cameras, are everywhere.
Yes, people have died from being stung by killer bees. Many people have died due to hyper-sensitivity to stings by more ordinary bees. No one likes getting stung by bees. This does not equate to a massive invasion and humanity-ending assault by bees of any level of aggression. Though if there were money to be made, I have no doubt we’d be treated to a Killer Bee psy-ops and everyone would be looking like this guy to go shopping or to get bee repellant vaccine shots.
A state of emergency would be declared and to “protect us from ourselves”, anyone not wearing the appropriate netting would be fined and/or arrested. Someone taking the garbage out to the curb on collection day, not dressed head-to-toe like they were Netman, the latest Marvel Comics superhero, would be vilified and attacked by shovel-wielding neighbors.
Sound at all familiar? Is it really so much of a stretch?
So what’s going on with the “pandemic”? And please let’s not resort to labels and ideological frameworks. This is not right wing or left wing. It’s not Republican or Democrat. It’s authoritarianism making a beeline for tyranny, and whether it’s “fascism” or “Trumpism” or “communism” or “corporatism” isn’t really relevant. Let’s just call this what it is.
How do we know? How do we know a real virus has been blown up into a fake pandemic?
Because there are many success stories across the globe fighting this latest disease, the latest pathogenic mischief-maker off the assembly line of misery that’s been churning away the entire course of recorded history. You probably won’t hear about these success stories in the monotone narrative of Covid-19 coverage in the U.S. media. I source news from all over the world and trust me, what’s going on in many other countries is nothing like what is unfolding in the United States of Dysfunction.
I’ll mention two from personal experience. Verifiable because I can see them with my own eyes. I’ve cited the first in public comments and various articles before . . .
Total deaths in Japan 2019: 1.38 million.
Total deaths in Japan 2020: 1.36 million.
Yes, in the raging scourge of a life-threatening coronavirus PANDEMIC, fewer people died in Japan than the year before the world was shrouded in a cloud of Covid-19 “killer bees”.
Secondly, two days ago, my wife talked to a Chinese friend, WHO LIVES IN CHINA. You know, the Kung Flu country, the Wuhan Virus nation of super-spreaders. His report: There’s now not a single case of Covid-19 in Beijing. NOT A SINGLE CASE! The guy is not political. He has no agenda. He’s not a member of the Communist Party there. He’s just stating the facts. His life is COMPLETELY NORMAL.
Actually, my life is completely normal, if you consider eating rice and tofu everyday normal.
Looking now at the big picture, what are we dealing with?
First, recognize that the statistics we’re fed are very suspect. The WHO instructed every nation to attribute the death of anyone who tests positive for the dread virus, whose death can’t be definitively proven to some other cause, as a Covid-19 casualty. So unless you’ve been hit by a bus or fallen into an erupting volcano, if there are Covid-19 antibodies in your system when you die, then that’s a Covid-19 death. Mind you, the whole mechanism for determining if you’re a “case” — meaning you test positive — is totally flawed. The PCR test everyone is using, according to the man himself WHO DESIGNED THE TEST, is inappropriate for this type of diagnosis and unreliable for detection and confirmation of Covid-19 infection.
Then there’s the conflation of ‘cases’ and ‘positive tests’. New cases are reported everyday, with ominous graphics and somber tones by talking heads. But a person can test positive, be completely healthy and unaffected, not even be contagious, and never ever experience any negative consequences from the presence of the virus in their system. For example, we all normally have a number of cancer cells in our bodies and bloodstreams. Our immune system keeps them in check, so we never come down with cancer. The mere detectable presence of a pathogen doesn’t say anything definitive about the onset of a disease. To report anyone who tests positive from a test that isn’t reliable in the first place, as a “case” — letting it be assumed they’re sick, coughing, wheezing, in a hospital, fighting for their lives — is very misleading.
Having said all that, let’s take a look at the official numbers, even though they are at best inaccurate and thus give a very skewed picture of what’s actually going on, with the errors contributing significantly to a sense of crisis and public panic.
It is reported as of today that there are 176,784,418 CASES of Covid-19. The World Population Clock says there are 7.77 billion people in the world. This means, supposedly only 2.275% of the world has even tested positive for the new “plague”. Many, if not most of these folks, aren’t even sick. Now, again recognizing that the number of deaths from Covid-19 stands at 3,826,567. With some basic math, this means .0129% of the world’s people have allegedly DIED of Covid-19, over almost 1 1/2 years.
For some perspective: Do you know how many people died during the real Plague? Well, ONE-THIRD of the population of London died in ONE SUMMER! Between 25,000,000 and 50,000,000 people died in Europe! That come to 30% TO 60% of everyone in Europe at the time. Deaths worldwide are estimated between 75 and 100 million. This was when the total population of the world was only 450 million.
That’s a REAL pandemic! Calling what’s going on now a pandemic is a total distortion of reality. Unfortunately, it’s working and people are panicking.
It could be argued that what we’re doing now is using modern medicine to prevent what might be a potential pandemic. Fine. A potential for something is not the same as the thing itself. There’s a potential the Earth will be struck by a huge asteroid. That’s not the same as the Earth being struck by a huge asteroid. If they made a sudden BREAKING NEWS announcement that the Earth had been hit by an asteroid, because some scientist estimated there was a 3 in 10 billion chance it could happen, they’d be lying. LYING!
Is Covid-19 dangerous? Granted, there are reality-deniers out there who say Covid-19 doesn’t even exist. Well, it’s real. Again just taking the inflated official numbers, 3,826,567 died out of 176,784,418 “cases” of infection. That’s .216% of supposedly infected people actually dying from it. Not 2% . . . but .2%!
The WHO reports the typical death rate from a typical influenza at .1% There are strains of influenza — for example H3N2 classified as a Type A strain — which can be much more lethal. So it looks like Covid-19 is slightly more dangerous than an average case of the flu. Caution and prudence are advised. Every possible treatment should be ready and waiting for anyone who actually contracts the disease.
But Covid-19 is NOT Ebola, Black Death, Hepatitis C, nuclear war, or a giant asteroid.
The startling thing, for me anyway, is that according to “official statistics” dished out by the CDC, the Covid-19 case fatality rate in the U.S. is 3.1%. What? 15 times what it is internationally? Something is wrong. Either the reporting system is screwed up, resulting in completely out-of-whack stats, or health care there is so abysmal, many treatable cases are resulting in unnecessary death. Somebody is not doing their job!
The people who are doing their job and making a killing along the way, are the big wigs running the pharmaceutical companies. And enough is never enough when there’s a raging pandemic of greed. The head of Pfizer says people who have been fully vaccinated with their EXPERIMENTAL and partially tested vaccine, will need a “booster” in 12 months. You see where this is headed?
Things here in Japan are good. People are sane, considerate of others, the government is very careful and measured in everything they’re doing to deal with Covid-19. But the U.S. is a whole different story.
The simple truth — and I’m not going to defend this with charts and piles of statistics because if you don’t even suspect there’s a problem in America or believe that (damn him) it’s all Trump’s fault, there’s no getting through to you anyway — yes, the simple, insulting, appalling, sickening truth is that a completely manageable health crisis has been willfully mishandled, the chaos and calculated social and economic disruption has been created and exploited purely for two obvious sinister intents: 1) bleeding more money out of our economy and us, its citizens; 2) more control, tyranny, and oppression, in order to silence any opposition or resistance to future plunder, i.e. accelerating the transfer of wealth and power upwards to the ruling elite.
So what can we do?
Understand that this whole manufactured crisis is not some fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants affair. It’s brilliantly, if diabolically, engineered for maximum impact. It’s been planned for a long time and they’ve paid attention to the details. Those responsible are not stupid and they’re not messing around. In fact, so much has already unfolded, and so many people gone along with this nonsense, it may be too late.
But we can try.
We must take back our lives. We have to take back our communities, street-by-street, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, church-by-church, local-business-by-local-business.
There were huge protests in London April of this year against coerced vaccinations and Covid-19 “passports”.
We can’t let the establishment bullies get away with this. And as we see from the recent demonstration in London, people in other countries are waking up to the lockdown scam.
We must try to stop this manufactured crisis. People need to know and defend their rights. Most importantly, we must do everything possible to stand strong against tyranny in any form.
As the brilliant, if gloomy, Chris Hedges says: We do this not because we know we’ll be successful. We do this because it’s the right thing to do.
I’ve been asking myself a question. I’ve been asking it very quietly, because if I ask it out loud, I’ll be mobbed for being a racist pig. Here’s the question: Why is it racist to state this straightforward moral proposition?
All lives matter.
I get the obvious argument. Allegedly up until now, it’s only been us privileged white folks whose lives have mattered. Black lives didn’t matter before. Only white lives. So now black lives matter.
It’s symmetry. Get it?
The problem with this is obvious. Do the lives of 68,000 mine workers in West Virginia who have died from black lung disease since 1968 matter? Their lungs end up black but the victims are white. Did the lives of the 58,220 soldiers who died in the Vietnam War matter? 52,980 of them were white. That pile of white corpses resulting from a senseless, illegal war didn’t seem to matter. Did the lives of millions suffering through the Great Depression, some starving to death, matter? Granted, African-Americans got hit harder. But the white folks didn’t seem to matter enough to keep the predators from crashing the economy again in 2008, then putting everyone in debt up to their eyebrows.
You get the picture. Everyday Americans are endlessly subjected to indignities which degrade the quality of their lives, sometimes consigning them to death. There has been nothing race-specific about such abuse, and white folks have not been exempt.
Class warfare is color blind. To the ruling class — the .1% who have the wealth and power — race, ethnicity, religious beliefs pretty much don’t matter. As long as you have a body and a brain they can put to use in maximizing profit, you matter. When they’re done with you, well, now you don’t matter. Your problems are your problems. We might be deluded into believing that as a nation we’re all in this together. We’re not. You and I are in it together. The rich and powerful are in it for themselves.
Same with the imperial project, the ambitious design to rule the world. As long as you can hold a rifle and shoot straight, color of skin, gender, sexual preferences, etc are not an issue. Yes, gender and sexuality have mattered as a disciplinary and effectiveness concern within the ranks of the military. But the people who decide on the wars couldn’t care less about the details, as long as our military does the job, and makes the world safe for plunder and profit-seeking subjugation.
The point is, no lives matter to the ruling class, except their own.
So back to the question: Why can’t we say ‘all lives matter’?
You’re not going to like the answer.
It’s because ‘All lives matter’ is unifying … and ‘Black lives matter’ is divisive.
Can’t have everyone on the same team. A populous united under a single banner would be an unstoppable force for change, justice, fairness, equality. Slice and dice. BLM vs Proud Boys vs Antifa vs Boogaloo Bois vs NFAC vs Karens … keep everybody in a huge brawl!
Now let’s see where this strategy takes us. If we say ‘Palestinian lives matter’, we’re Jew haters. If we say ‘Russian lives matter’, we’re commie-loving Putin-apologists. If we say, ‘Asian lives matter’, we’re cheerleaders for the Wuhan Flu super-spreaders. If we say ‘All lives matter’, we’re nigger-hating white supremacists.
Divide and conquer. Divide and oppress. Works every time.
We can look to a couple telling examples of prominent spokespersons who powerfully advocated for ‘all lives’ not that long ago.
Fred Hampton
Fred Hampton was a much-admired, highly successful organizer for the Black Panther Party in Chicago. The corrupt white municipal leaders there tolerated him until the very end. But Fred got out of control. He started organizing white and Latino youth groups, normally considered black-hating racists, to fight a common enemy, the political and economic elite of the city. “Through a long and arduous process, he had succeeded in building a ‘Rainbow Coalition’ of working class blacks, latinos, and whites.”
That would get him killed. He was brutally assassinated by a hit squad from the Chicago Police Department in the middle of the night as he slept.
Another example is more familiar. He’s the author of this quote.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
In the last year of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr. called for unity, a struggle against “cruel manipulation of the poor.” The ruling elite knew a bad thing when they saw it. We all sorrowfully know what happened.
How convenient it is that now ONLY black lives matter, when it is only by standing shoulder to shoulder, black folks with their white, brown, yellow, and red brothers and sisters, emboldened and unified, working together to defeat our common enemy, that anything will matter at all. Separated from one another into isolated pockets, protecting our own territory and exclusive interests, only the lives and fortunes of the rich and powerful, the tiny elite aristocratic minority, who purposely and systematically work to keep us disunited and at one another’s throats, will matter.
I’m still trying to reconcile this and a second report to come up with a meaningful, hopeful picture for the future of our country. One that’s not built around bullets, bombs, stealth fighters, attack drones, nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, killer satellites, and the possible shrouding of the planet in a cloud of life-ending radioactive dust.
The problem is me, of course. It seems I’m allergic to chaos, destruction, death, maiming, carnage, genocide, ecocide, macho posturing, chest-beating. I don’t find war drums at all appealing, or even danceable.
Others — according to the report, it comes in at 62% of our fine citizens — find reason to implicitly celebrate all of the above, judging that the $715 billion official 2022 defense budget, proposed by President Biden, is right on the money, so to speak. In fact, 17% of those polled think we need to spend more.
By the way, I specifically chose ‘official defense budget’ because that has never really been the whole story. The second report was done in 2019. It’s by the Congressional Research Service and is titled Overseas Contingency Operations Funding: Background and Status. You can view it here.
“The Congressional Research Service has estimated that such supplemental spending from September 11, 2001, to fiscal year 2019 totaled an astonishing $2 trillion above and beyond the congressionally agreed upon Pentagon budget.”
Even this is not the entire picture. Because buried in the budgets of the Department of Energy, the Department of Homeland Security, secretive funding of the CIA, the 17 major agencies of the intelligence community, and other national security related organizations, is unreported black budgeting. We can only offer educated guesses on the sums allocated to these agencies. We do know they run in the tens of billions of dollars.
So as we’re struggling to find the money — we all know it’s there but the fiscal conservatives require us to put on a show of penurious virtue signaling to slap down the MMT folks — to repair our infrastructure, address climate change, convert the U.S. economy into the right stuff for the 21st Century challenges of stability and sustainability, scramble to either put together a viable health care system or find a place to bury the bodies, address massive unemployment and underemployment, achieve solvency for Social Security and other unfunded liabilities, yes, as we scour every square inch of our great country sea-to-shining-sea with metal detectors, looking for every buried nickel and dime for all of these noble and necessary endeavors, the vast majority of citizens have decided the $1+ trillion we spend ANNUALLY to police Planet Earth, spy on our own citizens, put bases and weaponry in any country that will have us, expand NATO and increase the probability of a major war, build “more usable” nuclear weapons, deploy our fighting machinery in outer space, intimidate Russia and China, and create hostility and enemies across the globe, is money well spent.
I will credit the Deep State and MIC with a true victory here. While “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known” (George W. Bush), “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known” (Barack Obama), has been humiliated and/or defeated in every military conflict since World War II, the massive psyops brainwashing of the American public has been a resounding success!
My lovely wife just told me that our village has “work days” coming up, the 13th and 27th of June. When the weather is accommodating, one member from each household reports at 8:00 am for a work day — it’s always a Sunday — and we do whatever needs to be done to keep our village clean, attractive, and functional.
I can’t begin to tell you how cool I think this is! Despite living in a variety of different cities and towns in four of the fifty states in America, I’ve never encountered anything quite like community work days. The attitude there tends to be “let someone else take care of it” or “the government should do it, since we’re paying out all this money in taxes.” Well, Japanese pay taxes too, but there are still things that need to get done. The local citizens take pride in helping out.
Mind you, the only other country I’ve been in that’s as clean as Japan, is Switzerland. Trust me, it’s very unusual to ever see litter anywhere here, but on the off-chance that a candy wrapper or soda can should get left on the ground, that’s one possible work day assignment, collecting the rare cigarette butt or plastic bag lying around. Since there’s practically nothing to pick up, we usually apply ourselves to other more fruitful tasks.
We each get to take home one of these flower planters, the rest will be distributed throughout the village, along the more frequently traversed lanes.
On the 13th, we’ll be cutting and clearing weeds and bamboo from Noma Village’s shared property — that not owned by individuals — then planting flowers around the community center (photo at top of this article) where we meet for various activities. For example, see Annual Neighborhood Barbecue and Annual Neighborhood Curry and Bingo Party). Finally, more flower planting in portable boxes which will decorate the area.
On the 27th, we’ll be cleaning up the grounds for our local shrine. This will mostly consist of hacking away at weeds, clearing overgrown brush, cutting vines from the trees. Here I am last year with my neighbor Yamamoto-san doing exactly this.
The other big set of duties for work day get-togethers is maintenance of water irrigation ditches and pathways, vital for keeping our crops growing. 95% of what we grow is rice and soybeans, the other 5% is vegetables of different sorts.
I guess there might be naysayers and cynics out there who because they haven’t grown up in Japan, don’t understand this type of community spirit. But from what I’ve personally seen, the locals love it! Not only are we doing something useful and beneficial for ourselves and our neighbors, but it’s a chance to spend three or four hours together. The social aspect is just as important as its functional contribution.
Hey! If you happen to come visit me and it’s a work day, I’ll bring you along. You can see for yourself what it’s all about, make yourself useful, and as a bonus, get a free bottle of tea and a pastry when we take a short break at the halfway mark. It’s a win-win!
I can’t believe Tom Cruise didn’t put me in his movie!
Have you seen the James Bond film You Only Live Twice? At one point 007 was being given ninja training and those particular scenes were filmed at one of the most famous castles in Japan, Himeji Castle. It’s also known as the ‘White Egret Castle’ because its intensely white walls and majestic architecture apparently makes many folks think of a huge bird taking flight.
More recently, Himeji is associated with the Tom Cruise movie The Last Samurai, but that was actually shot at the nearby Engyoji Temple and Daikodo, a mountain village once used for training of priests.
In any event, the castle is almost seven centuries old, dating back to 1333 CE. I won’t begin to attempt summarizing its long, glorious history. I will, however, offer a few interesting facts and highlights.
Himeji Castle is the largest castle in Japan, its architecture is prototypical of all such castles, it is made of stone and wood, has extensive fortifications dating to Japan’s feudal times. From Wikipedia: “The castle complex comprises a network of 83 buildings such as storehouses, gates, corridors, and turrets (櫓, yagara). Of these 83 buildings, 74 are designated as Important Cultural Assets: 11 corridors, 16 turrets, 15 gates, and 32 earthen walls.” Registered December 1993, Himeji Castle was one of the first locations designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Japan.
It has been remodeled and rebuilt a number of times. Significantly, however, it survived the massive firebombing campaign of WWII, which leveled the entire surrounding town. A firebomb actually landed on the top floor but failed to detonate. It also survived the Great Hanshin Earthquake — aka Kobe Earthquake — of 1995. Himeji is only 50 km (31 miles) west of Kobe.
Though it’s only about a 1 1/2 hour drive from my home here to Himeji, I’ve only visited the castle twice. It’s spectacular and deserves greater attention, for sure. Here are a few photos I took my first visit, then more recently when a friend from the Netherlands visited.
Life In Japan: Kawashima Highway Oasis
There’s a whole chapter in my book, LIVE FROM JAPAN!, devoted to Japan’s highway service areas. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, these are the equivalent to what we in the U.S. call ‘rest areas’. They provide a place during a long drive on a highway to pull off the road, stop, stretch your legs, go to the restroom, and for those which have the facilities, to buy some snacks and refreshments.
While functionally they are the same, Japan takes this convenience to a whole different level. Many highway service areas here are mini-malls! I have examples in my book of some typical ones to illustrate how elaborate and well-equipped they usually are.
Having said that, this past weekend my wife and I stopped at one on our way to camping in the Japanese Alps, which was really over the top!
Of course, it had the usual amenities: a restaurant, food court, fast food and ice cream stands, a souvenir shop, vending machines, beautiful clean restrooms.
However, on the inside court it was a spectacularly different story. Inside there was a small but adequate water playground!
This was not a paid admissions theme park. It was free and provided fountains and pools for the whole family to splash around and enjoy. Since this entire summer has been a real scorcher, I can’t overstate how welcome this surprise feature was for everyone stopping by this aptly named ‘highway oasis’.
What can I say? Japan goes out of its way to make life a pleasant adventure for everyone. Too bad this highway service area is not next to my house. Or I could be splashing around in the fountains every day to keep cool!