This year`s Winter break provided my family with the great chance to travel in the beautiful Japan. We decided to fulfill the wish of our son Kentaro and visit Fuji Q Highland （富士急ハイランド）in Yamanashi （山梨県）. Fuji Q Highland is located on the North side of Mount Fuji just next to the picturesque lake Kawaｇuchi (河口湖） in [...]
The last few days of the year in Tokyo have been very beautiful with clear blue skies & the sun shining, of course it is still cold with temperatures –day time around 7C & night between 2-4C It’s the time of the year I like to get out and visits temples & shrines Last week [...]
During the second half of 2011 Smith’s School of Koenji had three getherings of students family & friends Two were held at Rainbow Koenji Minami & our year end party was held at ban-kan also in Koenji Minami http://ban-kan.com, each of them had 18 or more in attendance & we all had a very wonderful [...]
One of my students is from a rural area north of Kyoto and last weekend we had the pleasure of visiting his fathers house while returning from the beach along the Japan Sea coast. Plenty of other bikers, like myself, were out touring in the sunshine, especially from Osaka. It appeared that I was the [...]
Hi everyone! It’s been a very long while since I last talked much on the topic of astronomy. Two main reasons are that I have had very little time for astronomy this summer, and even then the sky conditions were so unusually and uniformly bad that there really was no point. Atmospheric instability dominated July and August so most [...]
Every once in a while you just have to get away and relax, and this year with all its ups and downs and continuous bad news here and there and all around the world, it is tempting to just remain complacent and wait for better times. At least we are not at war! But the [...]
Hello y’all! I hadn’t actually planned this to become a competition but as an after-thought, here it is! We really do have a favorite festival each year! So here goes: this is the third and final installment in my rather lengthy 2011 Fireworks Festival Calendar and Review. Tsuruga has by far and wide been our favorite [...]
The second festival on our most-loved list and one that deserves at least an honorable mention in any one’s top five review is the Aug 8th show at Otsu Biwako. This is a very good show in a charming setting but the crowd can be quite daunting as you’d expect. The setting off the beach [...]
Hope you all had a great break! With the festival season now pretty much coming to a close, I thought it might be a good idea to review and recap some of the festivals that my wife Yoko and I are particularly fond of. The rationale behind this is that next year all of you [...]
Hello all! Now I cannot profess to know very much about Ikebana, but it is one of my wife Yoko’s favorite hobbies and she is surprisingly intuitive and talented for it. Sagagoryu is the type of Ikebana Yoko has studied at length as a hobby, but anyone even remotely knowledgable on the subject can tell [...]
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