Scenes from the Streets of Kochi

Kochi city in Shikoku was one our favorite towns to walk around. Here is a selection of some of the sights that caught my eye. This cat was sat on top of a restaurant beside the Onagadori centre

The whale was buried in the pavement in the covered shopping plaza in the centre of the town.

Along with these fishes stuck on the side of the building a bit further up the road

This Koban (Police station) was quite stylish. I've sometimes considered the idea of doing a photo series on the huge variety of Koban you can find, from these eye catching modern ones, to tiny, eldery cabins. My main worry would be getting arrested for suspicious behaviour.

Cafe Mephistopheles, looked quite interesting, but we were not looking for coffee when we walked past.

There are two Tramlines in Kochi, one running north / south, and the other east / west. Trams are of a variety of ages and styles from the elderly to the modern. Fares are 190Yen in the city centre and increase as you go beyond that.

Temple with very large straw Shimenawa (on the south side of the main road heading west out of the city centre).

Railway Technical Research Institute - Open Day 2012

Thanks to a posting on the Yahoo Japan Trains group I got to hear about the Railway Technical Research Institute Open Day. The research complex at Kunitachi is usually open once a year to allow the staff to show the public what they work on.

I went along this afternoon and took a few photos.

The rail welding demonstration is quite a spectacular display of pyrotechnics

Several of the large machine shops used for testing railway technology were open. This one is used to test the tensile strength of rails:

The pantograph testing device was very interesting, and the rail fastener testing device was also in operation and you could watch it rattle the rail. You could take a two minute ride on the Hi-Tram, if you were prepared to queue for, what looked like, quite a while.

Inside there are plenty of indoor attractions too. Model railways were very popular:

There were various displays and demonstrations including superconducting magnets, one involving a lot of what I guess was liquid nitrogen to demonstrate the effect of low temperatures. Another 40 photos of the event are here if you would like to see more.

Chinkabashi (Sinking bridges)

The shimanto river is famous for a particular kind of bridge called Chinkabashi : Sinking or Subsidence bridge. They are designed so that the river can flow over the bridge during high water. (I've just discovered from Wikipedia they could also be called Low water crossing rather than Submersible bridge as that implies that the bridge actually moves to submerge itself) The southern most bridge of this type on the Shimanto river is the Sada bridge.

Further upriver was the Takase bridge :

And this is what they look like when the river is over the top at Katsuma:

We almost did not get to see these bridges but I am glad that in the end we did. We walked over the first one, and the sensation of the river being so close and the power of the rushing water was quite an exhilarating experience. Standing on the edge while the cars pass is also not for the faint hearted.

There are more photos of what they look like when not covered in water in this forum thread and on the Japanese Wikipedia page for Chinkabashi (沈下橋)

Bloglovin' and blogging

I'm doing the regular(ish) JapanBloglist 'latest blogs added' post today and I keep on seeing links to this BlogLovin' website, so I thought I'd sign up. Please  Follow my blog with Bloglovin.  It seems I already have one follower which is a nice surprise!

Big shout out Diamond Geezer and thanks for the link back to this humble blog.  Every year DG does a report on what blogs link to him. Last year I was rightly dropped off his list due to my lack of posting. He is one the reasons I started blogging back in 2006, but I have never been able to match his prose, style and 100% reliability in posting every single day since he started in in 2002: Yes, over ten years of blogging. I agree with his observation about how many blogs these days have abandoned the bloglist as a way providing links for readers to their favorite blogs, however I disagree with his observation that the number of bloggers is decreasing. I continue to get new blogs submitted to The Japan Blog List, there is usually at least three or four a week.

In other blogging news I've been helping Rick start up Tokyo Hometown. He approached me via Japan Blog List looking for some help to setup a blog and I volunteered to help him get started. He has got some interesting anecdotes and photos about life in Tokyo. He does not want comments, which I have so far been unable to change his mind on, so if you want to give him any feedback you have to find his email address on his 'about' page.
Update : He has changed his mind and now allows comments!

Onagadori (Long Tailed Rooster) center Kochi

When my wife was preparing our itinerary for our trip to Shikoku we got a number of tourist brochures posted to us from the local tourist information office. One such brochure had an attraction that immediately caught my eye. It had merely three sentences and a small photo: "The Onagadori is a rare bird that has been adopted as a natural treasure and bred in the Onagadori Centre. The tail of the male bird can grow to over ten metres long. Onagadori have been bred in Kochi since the Edo era to improve the species". There was no address or phone number and just a red blob indicating it's location somewhere vaguely near Kochi City. Ten meters? are you serious ? this I have to see.

After a little more research I found a map that included the location and we set off to visit the birds in the afternoon on a Wednesday. After stopping to ask for directions at a petrol station, we arrived at the centre to find it firmly closed, even though it was only around 3pm. There was no indication as to why it was closed or even if was still in business, however the sound of a cock crowing convinced us it was worth coming back for.

The next day the hotel receptionist managed to find a telephone number for the centre and called them to confirm the opening times. Apparently yesterday had been some sort of chicken holiday and they had been closed, but they were open today. So we set off for a second time and arrived back here:

Onagadori centre Kochi city

We paid the 500 Yen entrance fee and the lady behind the counter took us around to the back. She apologised profusely for not speaking any English, and we apologised for not understanding any Japanese. The bird cages were all closed, but soft clucking and shuffling noises indicated that each cage was indeed occupied.

Custom built cages for the roosters.

The lady produced a battered copy of National Geographic magazine from 1970 with a fascinating article regarding the birds and a Polish bird fanciers magazine with an item on the birds as well. She then opened just one cage and allowed us to admire the bird inside.

A mighty fine bird

The tail is absolutely unbelievably long!

It is so long she keeps it coiled up neatly and attached to a hook inside the cage you can just see on the left above. She gently uncoiled the tail and allowed us to gingerly lay the fine black feathers over our arms for a photo opportunity:

We admired the bird and his feathers and I took a few more photos, before he was soon closed up again in his custom built cage. I got to take a few more photos of some the exhibits of photos of the birds with celebrities and various other momentos. I also noticed a 1982 copy of the Guinness Book of world records (sadly the record does not appear to be on their website). On our way out, as the lady once again apologised for not speaking English, she gave us a tail feather from one of the roosters.

I just measured it at 2.22m. We are at a bit of a loss as to what do with it. Any suggestions?

I really hope the centre survives and continues to breed these wonderful creatures. 
The address is 4-8 Shinohara, Nankoku-shi, Kochi-ken, Shikoku ( if you head out of Kochi city towards the airport, it's on your left on route 55 just beside the Yellow Hat tyre garage.

Opening times are 09:00 to 17:00 from March to October, and 09:00 to 16:00 the rest of the year. Tel: 088 864 4931.

Ginza Art Gallery tour

I have enjoyed the Improv comedy shows from The Pirates of Tokyo Bay on several occasions and every time I go I always buy some raffle tickets for the prize draw they hold each time. The last time I went to What the Dickens to enjoy the show, I was delighted to win a free voucher from the FindJpn.com team for an Art Gallery tour in Ginza. It made a nice change to take a half day off work and spend it visiting six different art galleries earlier this afternoon.

Our tour guide Yoko selected a range of galleries to visit that cover a variety of different styles. One of my favorites was the Shukado gallery. In contrast to the other galleries, where the paintings are hanging on the walls, here we were treated to examine some fine Ukiyoe prints carefully extracted from storage. The gallery assistant explained that collectors have to keep the wood block prints away from light to prevent them fading. There were some Views of Mt Fuji from the famous artist Utagawa Hiroshige, and other prints including one with a giant spider which was very striking.

At another gallery the walls were filled with the works of André Cottavoz. Now there's an artist that really laid it on with a trowel. I casually enquired about the price of the one of the, almost three-dimensional, works of art: it was 2.7million Yen. The gallery owner also admitted that the price had come down from the previous price tag of 3.2 million yen. For Cottavoz, who died recently, it seems death has not brought on a increase in the price of his paintings.

In the final gallery we visited, three of Lee Mingwei's installations are on display. The works were not for-sale, I leave it to your imagination why that is so.

Our guide was friendly and enthusiastic. If you were a tourist visiting Tokyo with limited time and a very keen interest in purchasing art, I think she would be helpful in locating galleries and talking with the staff. For residents: have a wander around Ginza, drop into some of the over 200 galleries and let me know what you see.

Dragonfly Nature Park, Shimanto City, Shikoku

The Dragonfly Kingdom Nature Park is a well known attraction in the area. Just outside the town centre of Nakamura in Shimanto-ku is a 50 hectare park featuring enough habitats to give you the potential to see 76 different species of dragonfly.

Construction of the Dragonfly sanctuary began in 1986 with the conversion of some abandoned paddy fields into ponds with a variety of flowers selected to be attractive to dragonfly. Work has continued and now includes a sizable museum and fresh water aquarium. Of course, not all the dragonfly species are observable in the nature park at any one time, the different species have hatching periods between March and December.

If you arrive on very wet day, like we did, you may see only a couple of the insects outside in the park. However, while the specimens mounted in display cabinets inside can't quite match the sparkling iridescence of real live creatures, they certainly give you an excellent display of the wide variety that exists.

The aquarium section of the museum housed some of the most enormous and unusual fish I've seen. The stars of the show are the Arapaima Gigas.

If you show up at 4pm, you might get to help feed them if you are lucky. They snap up their dinner of small fish with lightening fast bites. It quite enthralled these young children, which also gives you an idea of the size of the fish.

All my other photos of the fish were of poor quality. This is one of the less bad ones of one of the many unusual species they have there. The 80 large and small tanks contain over 300 different species with more than 3,000 specimens of freshwater fish and estuarine water fish from Japan and around the world. Most are well labelled with the latin names.

Entry to the Nature park is free, The museum and aquarium are open from 09:00 to 17:00 every day except Monday, Entrance fee 840Yen. (420Yen for children.)

 Access is 10 minutes by car from Nakamura station on the Tosa Kurishio line. Many more pictures on the Dragonfly Kingdom website. ( Japanese text only)

Bleach the new toilet cleaner?

Taken from my cell phone earlier this evening at Roppongi. Anyone know who he is? Update: Thanks to RudeBoyAbroad for the details : He's called Ichigo and he's a Shinigami. He fights supernatural bad guys in the series called Bleach. So named because he cleanses souls so that they can pass on to the afterlife, and because the creator liked the Nirvana album "Bleach." Wow, a whole wikipedia dedicated to the series.

Lawrys Akasaka Tokyo

Went for some prime Rib this evening at Lawry's Akasaka Tokyo. We all went for the 'Party Course' menu. Tempting little non meat starters of Salmon and shrimp, the 'spun salad' ( way too much dressing for my liking) and the soup came first to make the mouth water. Then the huge famous meat trolley comes round :

The meat was very tender and tasty. What was surprising, for such an American based eatery, was the Yorkshire pudding. To finish was an 'English Trifle'. The yanks at the table were perplexed by the name, and the Brits at the table were equally confused when the small portion of sponge cake arrived. But hey who knows what an English Trifle really should taste like in Tokyo?

Sakamoto Ryoma Memorial Museum

We went to a number of museums during the holiday. One of the most modern and stylish looking building was the Sakamoto Ryoma Memorial Museum in Kochi.

Sakamoto Ryoma was born in Kochi in 1835 and made a major contribution to changes in the political scene in Japan. He was assassinated at age 33 shortly after he formulated the Eight point program for the modernisation of Japan.

The locals are understandably proud of their local hero, the airport is named after him and one Kochi cafe manages to produce an impressive portrait of Ryoma on their cafe lattes. It's a shame I only discovered that today otherwise I'd have my own photo to share.

The museum located on the coast about 20 minutes drive from Kochi centre is open from 9am to 5pm all year round and entrance fee is 500 yen.

There are not that many exhibits for such a large building and very little English text. The museum website reproduces the brochure which contains basically all the exhibit labels that were in English, so unless your Japanese is very strong it does not take that long to go round.

Japanese Castles

I've just come back from a couple of weeks holiday. During our trip we visited three different castles. Just for fun, no prizes, see if you can identify these three castles .

catching the last train home

Shibuya Inokashira line

Interview with Me about Japan Blog List

As I've mentioned before JapanBlogList.com takes up some of my spare time, to the detriment of this blog sadly. I was recently contact by Steve 'Grin' Isobe-Harsha who wanted to add his blog to the list. As always I asked for a link back in return, to which he replied

Thank you for adding me to your list. I say this tongue in cheek, I am kind of strict on links. I only link to others that interview, are Relevant, donate, or link to me. You linked to me, but I would like to give you more than just a link back in return. I would definitely like to interview you and write a longer piece on your creative and helpful blog!


Who can resist an interview? So last week over a skype session we had a very pleasant chat, and the net result is Episode 6 of his podcast An interview with Jonathan Allen at JapanBlogList.

Movember the first

I'm growing a moustache for November.

Sponsor me at Movember.com to raise money for Men's health charities.

The funds raised in the UK support the number one and two male specific cancers - prostate and testicular cancer. The funds raised are directed to programmes run directly by Movember and our men’s health partners, The Prostate Cancer Charity and the Institute of Cancer Research. Together, these channels work together to ensure that Movember funds are supporting a broad range of innovative, world-class programmes in line with our strategic goals in the areas of awareness and education, survivorship and research.

Improv Comedy in Tokyo: Pirates of Tokyo Bay

I am always on the lookout for Comedy shows to go to and, thanks to a review in the Japan Times I discovered some Improv Comedy happening a pub called 'What the Dickens' in Ebisu.
A group calling themselves the Pirates of Tokyo did a show on Oct 16th 2011

Doors opened at :7:00pm and the show started at 7:30 Entrance was 1500 Yen which included one free drink. Food was available.

Location : "What the Dickens" , 1-13-3 EBISU-NISHI SHIBUYA-KU TOKYO. 3 minutes walk from Ebisu station, JR Yamanote line and Hibiya subway line.

If you have ever seen the TV show "Who's line is it anyway" then you'll know the kind of thing.

The show was in both English and Japanese. I was interested to see how they would handle that. In fact it was very well done with some games all in English, some all in Japanese, and some in a mixture with some translations.

The show is divided in to a number of different games.




I really enjoyed the evening and I am looking forward to their next show they hope to put some time in December. I'll be posting details here when I hear about it.

Random Photo of the day

I took this photo this afternoon somewhere in Tokyo. No prizes, but can anyone guess where this is?



Yes, they have wheels on them, and no I have no idea what they are going to do with them. They appeared within the last month.

One of the joys of life in Tokyo, the random things you see around here every day.

Ishinomaki , 3 months further on

Saturday 11 June 2011 marked the 3 month anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that struck the Tohoku region. I took the opportunity to go to Ishinomaki, in Miyagi Prefecture to do some volunteer work.

The organiser had hired a 26 seater coach and we departed Tokyo just after 8pm. The two coach drivers took it in turns to drive us through the night, arriving at 3am at the Ishinomaki Senku University. They turned on all the coach lights to tell us they’d arrived and to go back to sleep until 7am! Mercifully there were no loud snorers but I still only managed about an hour of sleep. At 7am we drove several miles to find a Shikyu restaurant, where we all ate a hearty breakfast before returning to the Volunteer Centre at the Senku University Campus, to get our assigned task for the day.


The organisers’ desk opens at 8am every day and they efficiently processed us and the many hundreds of volunteers that were staying in tents or had arrived in cars and coaches. For those of us who had not been before, we were given small green insurance certificates and everyone was given a sticky label to attach to their clothing with your name, and to indicate that you were a volunteer. So we got into our working gear. Wellington (rubber) boots are by far the best footware, with gloves, helmets, dust masks and protective eye goggles and drove set out to start work on a small hospital building.



The first stage of cleanup had already been done, that was to bag up most of the small items of rubbish, and one room was piled high with rubbish bags.




We formed a human chain and made short work of shifting them outside where the council will take responsibility for removing them. The next stage was to remove all the large items : beds, chairs, tables and other furniture.



We then broke for lunch, which was at the same place as breakfast, earlier, and where there are two other restaurants open for business.


This is how it looked after the tsunami.



In the afternoon we returned for the final task, which was to shovel the sludge into bags. The thick, oily, mud had covered everything to a depth of approx. 2cm. It was fairly dry and didn’t smell too strong, though I was very careful to always wear gloves. The end result, You see the tide mark a few inches from the ceiling ?

That was how high the waters reached.

The mud filled sacks were taken outside into a separate pile and again the council will eventually come to collect it. Of course, one enormous problem for the disaster recovery is what to do with the massive amount of debris. Over 24 million tons alone in just three prefectures.

At exactly 2:46pm we had a moment of silence in remembrance of those who lost their lives, including the 24 people who had died in that same hospital.

After washing all the tools and the boots, we boarded the coach again and went to the port area of Ishinomaki, which had been hardest hit by the tsunami. There was almost total devastation, only a small number of structures remained. The damage was astounding.



More photos from Boston.com and some more of my photos on flickr

Another hour’s drive away was our hotel, and we arrived just in time for dinner, and with a little time to spare for the onsen. Those of us who were not completely exhausted, then stayed up for karaoke. The trip home on Sunday was uneventful, and we were back in Tokyo around 4:30pm. Dividing the cost of the coach between 26, it came to 10,000 yen each. The trip organiser had arranged for a volunteers’ certificate from the local ward office, and that entitled us to avoid payment of the expressway tolls, which would otherwise have added 30,000 to the total bill.

Only 15% of the ¥251.4 billion collected by the Red Cross has been distributed by local city and town civil servants who are, not surprisingly, struggling with the disaster themselves.

It's clear from my trip that one thing the locals do need is more man power. Cleaning out buildings is hard manual labour that really cannot be mechanised or automated. If you want to go up to the Tohoku region the organisation of volunteers, at least in Ishinomaki, is very good. If you don't speak Japanese Peaceboat are organising regular trips from Tokyo.

The trip from Tokyo by car or coach is long and expensive, what I'd like to see would be companies like H.I.S Travel offering cheap volunteer trips up there by shinkansen. I'm sure more people would be prepared to offer a day or two of labour if it was made easy and simple. What's your excuse for not helping?

This is my entry into this weeks:

Google thinks I'm Transport for London

This blog has been a bit thin recently, I've been spending far too much of my time on my other hobby of maintaining the JapanBlogList which ends up with me visiting a lot of other blogs and generally getting nothing else much done. If I'm not reading other people's blogs I'm posting random stuff on Facebook to amuse my friends such as The Chihuahua pulling a sled from Japanprobe, "Hug your wife day" from Japanalooza, the link between Pink tentacle posting an article on LED Smiles on Jan 17th, which got picked up the NY times on the 21st Jan and the Guardian on the 25th Jan as real craze , but swiftly debunked by the Japan Times on the 30th Jan.

My favorite was the 'incident writeup' for a recent problem when shinkansen trains were halted for more than an hour. seems they forgot to update some hard coded limits in the scheduling system. ( But then I am in IT, and part of my job is incident write ups to explain to our users what happened when things went wrong.)

But for a change, for no good reason this evening, I thought I would see if anyone does still bother to visit this blog. Heading over to trusty Google analytics I was surprised to see a steady stream of visitor's averaging around 100 per day. But what is most confusing is when I looked to see the key words they come for :



"TFL Map" TFL Tube Map, London Underground Map... and other variations account for eight out of the top ten hits.

Sure enough if you do a google search for TFL Map, in the section of images, the link on the first image of the underground map is a link to a post I did in 2007 titled "Seoul on the Jubilee Line"



In the post I had a link to a diagram showing all the cities which have, are building or are planning to construct an urban rail sytstem, arranged in the style of the London Tube map. I also included a link to the real map on the TFL Website to compare. So how come my blog rates higher than the real TFL site for their own image? Go figure.

Happy Christmas, from The Japan Times and Me

There was a Christmas gift lottery in the Japan Times two weeks ago. All you had to do was send them an email with your name and address and your preferred choice of gift from the list of six or seven different presents on offer. I selected what I imagined would be the least popular choices, sent off an email. Lo and behold on Saturday I got a nice hand addressed letter with a little surprise inside :



A bookmark in traditional lacquer technique, handmade and hand painted by Japanese craftsmen from Fuji-Tori.



I was delighted at such a beautiful piece of work, many thanks indeed to the Japan Times and Fuji-Torii for the gift.

So, to all my readers, enjoy your gifts and the holiday season. Wishing you all a very Happy Christmas, and all the best for the New Year.