Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: Japan
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I went to my first ever baseball game last night, with the students and staff of my department. We watched the Giants (Tokyo) vs. the Tigers (Osaka), a resounding Giants victory (about 6-3) – or at least I guess it was a resounding victory, because I know nothing about baseball. One of our students was…
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Today was moving day – up at 6am, finish packing, removalists come at 8am, cross the suburb of Kichijoji to our new river-side apartment in nearby Mure, then back to the house to clean, deliver a present to our previous landlord and done and dusted by midday. That was the plan. Things went a little…
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It’s often forgotten in modern times that women’s most basic rights weren’t won prettily or peacefully: the suffragettes‘ campaign for the vote included a coordinated campaign of vandalism against shops, a protracted hunger strike that led to women being forcefed in prison (with some horrific injuries, as one can imagine of turn-of-the-century doctors trying to…
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Saturday night saw me at Ikebukuro Chop, a tiny underground live venue, to see a couple of bands. My partner’s friend’s friend’s husband is the singer for the band pictured above, The Lechery From Mars, whose style clearly begs to be described as Cthulhupunk. The music is a kind of raucous light metal, not really…
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Ikaho is a hot spring resort in the mountains Northwest of Tokyo, about an hour and a half from Tokyo by bullet train and local train and bus. It is famous for being the historical summer home of emperor’s, and also for having a huge flight of stone stairs that runs from the bottom of…
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Battleship Island is an abandoned island in Nagasaki, that for some years was the most densely populated island on Earth. It was abandoned over a 3 month period in the 1970s, so most of the buildings were left intact, with even some possessions still inside. The island built up over 200 years for the sole…
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I’m in Nagasaki this week to attend the 86th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society for Infectious Diseases, where I have presented the results of my work building a mathematical model of the HIV Epidemic in Japan. The model is currently submitted to a journal so I can’t give any detail about it here, but…
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Spring has come, and the big event of the early spring is the cherry blossom viewing festival, hanami. These are the arrangements at 9am this morning in Inokashira park, Tokyo. All the blue mats are a spot someone has reserved for their viewing party, and the people sitting on the mats are likely junior members…
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I went to a Korean restaurant tonight, which was a bit of a disaster because I don’t know much about Korean food. The menu seemed to consist entirely of large bowls of spicy stuff (I got topkip, I think, rice cakes fried with onion and chilli in a chilli sauce, topped with chilli) or grilled…
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Today is the day that Japanese men have to repay the largesse they were shown by the fairer sex on Valentine’s Day; and so it’s the day that I have to repay my own massive chocolate haul. The White Day “tradition” in Japan (if you can call a wicked scheme hatched by Big Chocolate a…
Compromise and Conceit 