Yuutenji matsuri today. A lot of hinomaru bike helmets and smoked-glass windows on the periphery despite the apparent drive to to have tekiya food stalls ditch their yakuza associations, with the temples also being subject to penalties for allowing such folk in. May just have been high-spirited kids rocking in from out of town for fun, though. Will be nice when the frantic revving of small bike engines up and down nearby roads passes, though it’s intermittent at worst even now, and mostly quiet and Asia-warm, humid, faintly fragrant.
A man in Kyushu is trying to raise money to move out of Japan due to radiation concerns.
Just to be clear, that’s the Kyushu that’s 650 miles from Fukushima. In case you were about to consult your maps to see if there’s a Kyushu-mura within the exclusion zone.
He runs more risk of being flattened by a typhoon, or, for that matter, getting food poisoning from some questionable basashi, having his scrotum caught in a lathe, or being decapitated by an incautiously-thrown frisbee.
OK, “contaminated” food could reach him whatever the distance, but the chances of eating radioactive carrots in a country as paranoid about food safety screening as Japan is vanishingly slim.
I don’t buy these people’s paranoia, especially at that distance. But I think there’s an audience for it—or to be more specific, provincial, bigoted, ignorant Americans—that can be profitably exploited if one is short of moving expenses and needs a little help.
If you want to live somewhere else, fine. No need to involve the rest of the world in your rationalizations for it. But if you’re moving away from radiation even though you’re already 650 miles from its source, then I suspect the rest of the planet is going to prove equally scary, if not more so.
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via FT.com - Asia-Pacific companies
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This apparently is just beginning to take off in Japan. At what looks to be less than the cost of LASIK surgery, plus the no-lasers-slicing-your-eyeballs benefit, it sounds interesting. (Essentially, you wear corrective contact lenses as you sleep, which reshape your corneas and improve eyesight.)
Nice haiku quoted in this Asahi article, from a recently discovered letter by Akutagawa Ryunosuke:
もの言はぬ研ぎ屋の業や梅雨入空
梅雨入空 is read “ついりぞら” here. It seems to be an invention of Akutagawa’s, and the elided reading seems clever but slightly unfair until you try saying it and the “proper” reading back to back a few times and realise that they’re nearly indistinguishable. At which point you are again inclined to think that Akutagawa was, indeed, a clever bastard.
Why Is China Building These Gigantic Structures In the Middle of the Desert?
Targeting grids for orbital weapons? Floor plans for colossal ziggurats?
