We had a fine time of it in Kagoshima and Miyazaki. Here are some photos of our holiday. The first three were taken by Neil… sadly the rest, which I was hosting on Blue Melon, were lost when I failed to back them up and forgot to renew the subscription… [Read more…]
Yippee! We are off to Kagoshima and Miyazaki for our summer holidays in the second half of August! It will be our second visit to southern Kyushu in two years. Last summer we flew to Miyazaki from the good old Hiroshima Kannon airport, conveniently located in the south of Hiroshima [Read more…]
“I open my heart to myself like a sort of vitrine, and examine one by one all those love affairs of which the world can know nothing.” Charles Swann, in Cities of the Plain by Marcel Proust In his fascinating book, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of [Read more…]
A few months ago I was struck by the paucity of theatrical productions in Hiroshima and berated a few of my students on the matter. The pat answer was invariably “Ah, Japanese are very shy.” My protests don’t seem to have had much effect on the recreational habits of the million or so “shy” Hiroshimites, but they did land me a handful of free tickets for a kyogen performance on the noh stage at Aster Plaza towards the end of March.
The party I was attached to boarded the Moscow-bound train at Ulaanbaatar on the evening of 21st September. We had all received packed suppers from our guides and had also secured for ourselves a few other vital supplies from the bar of Ulaanbaatar’s main hotel. Thus fortified against the rumoured shortages of on-board refreshments we settled into our coupe for the first evening of our trans-Siberian journey.
From Shanghai to Beijing the countryside is low-lying, monotonous and heavily cultivated, with paddy fields flanking the Yangtse, tobacco and wheat fields farther north. Everything changes with the arrival of the wall-topped mountain ranges north of the capital. They are far removed from the upturned onigiri mountains of Japan, being more akin to loaves of bread, well risen and mouldy with age. As these mountains recede they give way to broad expanses of semi-steppe over which the sun sinks with interminable leisure.
This is the first of three articles I wrote for the Hiroshima Signpost magazine about my overland journey from Hiroshima to Berlin in September 1991. In this article, I leave Japan by ferry from Osaka and arrive in Shanghai three days later.
The BBC’s Julian May has produced an excellent – I want to say “beautiful” – radio programme for the Heart and Soul series about the bronze temple bells – bonshou – of Japan. The programme captures the physical and symbolic power of these bells very well: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p006dg47 A bonsho bell [Read more…]
The port of Sasebo is four stops up the line from Huis Ten Bosch. We took the hydrofoil from there across to Kamigoto, the main northern island group of the Goto island archipelago. We hired a car and spent the late afternoon and the next morning driving around (sometimes round [Read more…]
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