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I suppose that’s about enough words & pictures from around Shimane prefecture. Here are a few farewell shots from the Matsue city canal-boat tour. Matsue’s plentiful canals connect to the castle moat, and the boat tour, reasonably priced, departs from just outside its gates; a ticket is good for a whole day, and there are a couple of stops along the route. Looking to the right from our vessel, beneath one of Matsue’s many graceful bridges, you can see another canal boat. The boats looked basic but were actually pretty clever; the top was mechanized to fold down for low-overhead bridges, and there were screens that come up at the sides; we didn’t use those so I’m not sure what they’re for. The houses along the sides of the canals were unostentatious but pleasing to the eye,...

In 1902 a boy named Eishirou Abe was born in Yakumo, a village in Shimane; he took up the local trade, making Washi paper, and excelled; in 1968 he was designated a Living National Treasure. He died in 1985, but his workshop is still there; you can visit it, look at lots of beautiful paper, and make it yourself. Our Ruby road trip stopped there and we did those things. The papers are made from the bark of local river reeds; the preparation involves much picturesque pounding and stripping and mashing and boiling (they showed us a movie) which I bet isn’t actually that much fun; the movie suggested that this often happens in the snow. If you poke around starting any Web search for “Washi” you’ll find lots of pictures of remarkably beautiful paper. This isn’t one of them....

That’s the Adachi Museum of Art, and especially its associated garden which has been voted (by an authoritative-sounding gardening magazine) the best in Japan for a half-dozen years now. Our road trip stopped there, alas for only an hour, and I took pictures. But not of the museum; that’s strictly off-limits. If you have any sort of affection for Japanese art, you might want to page through its Web site’s “Collection” page, although the online images are mean-spiritedly small. This is particularly true of the big featured image, “Autumn Leaves”, only on display in that season, which is painted on six large screens, enough to fill most of a wall in a really big room with astounding scarlet and blue. I liked a lot of the pictures, although thought it was almost all very...

Our story thus far: a gaggle of gaijin are invited to hold forth at RubyWorld 2009 in a little-noticed corner of Japan. The conference was on Monday and Tuesday; Wednesday they took us on a scenic Shimane tour. Matz and Ko1 and Prof. Takeuchi came along, and I got pictures so you can too. (For context, see 島根 September — Liking Matsue.) The logistics were complicated. Abigail and Evan Phoenix needed to fly to Tokyo that afternoon, as did Prof. Takeuchi (previously featured here) and Sasada Koichi. So someone figured out a bus route that would hit a bunch of the local highlights and still get them to the airport on time. It started early; while we were waiting blankly in the lobby for the bus, Miyao-san the conference organizer said “Oh, Matsumoto-san will also come today.”...

I’ve written a lot about Tokyo and early on, I said “Tokyo doesn’t need you to like it”. Well, Matsue wants you to like it. Also, Tokyo is, by and large, butt-ugly while Matsue, by and large, isn’t. (For context, see 島根 September — Kunibiki Messe.) Aesthetics Now I should probably apologize to the Tokyo folk. Tokyo has a lot of beautiful things and places, and really a lot of stylish fun-to-look-at people, but it’s too crowded and too polluted and overbuilt and garish. Doesn’t mean I don’t like going there, doesn’t mean I don’t love taking pictures of it, but a few days there make my eyes ache for grace and space and green and uncaged water. On this last trip, I made a little shopping expedition into Tokyo, Shinjuku to be precise, in between airports on the...

I’m heading home after a couple of days of customer visit in Minneapolis. The week before, I’d been in Matsue, a small and remote Japanese city. The prices were about the same, but Japanese hotel was decisively better, and it’s just silly that North American hotels are so crappy in so many ways. In Minneapolis, it doesn’t matter whether it was a Sharriott or or a Hilyard or a Crowne Suites or an Embassy Plaza, hotel brands are dilute to the point of vacuousness. In Japan, it was the Matsue Tokyu Inn, very much like the “Ladies Twin” illustrated on that page. MatsueMinneapolis A window that opened and a small unobtrusive air conditioner that could move the temperature up or down unobtrusively. Window wouldn’t open, and the climate control sounded like a 747 taking...

The RubyWorld 2009 conference was held at Matsue’s own conference center, Kunibiki Messe. It’s a cool place and I couldn’t resist taking a bunch of pictures. (For context, see 島根 September — RubyWorld.) Here’s a picture of the outside, courtesy of Wikipedia. The main conference room was that big bulge at the right; it’s not obvious in the picture that it’s semi-circular. In my last write-up there’s a picture of Matsue Mayor Matsuura standing with his back to that window you can see stretching around it. Anyhow, in that picture you can see that the building has a large transparent section in the middle; I got stuck in there taking pictures in every which direction. Here they are. It’s graceful and elegant and also fun, something architecture too rarely even...

The reason I went to Japan was to attend RubyWorld 2009, a conference centering around the Ruby programming language. The reason the conference was in this rather remote corner of Japan is that Matsumoto Yukihiro (known to geeks as “Matz”), the inventor of Ruby, chooses to live and work in Matsue, and the city and prefecture governments are trying to use his presence as leverage in diversifying the local economy into Open-Source software. While the conference was reasonably well-covered in the Japanese media, I’ve seen nothing in English, so I’ll try to rectify that here. With pictures. (For context, see 島根 September — The Castle.) Oh yes, the Japanese media; here’s one of them doing a video interview with Matz; they both seeemed to enjoy it. Did I say Matsue was...

Matsue’s number-one tourist attraction is its castle (松江城), which is absolutely worth a visit. Here are eight photographs, with diversions into ninja and programming culture. (For previous context, see 島根 September — Matsue Morning.) This is the view as you arrive, the moat expanding to a considerable pond, which is full of slow-moving turtles and high-jumping fish. Once you get a little closer, you realize how big that wall really is. The gentleman in the picture is Bruce Tate, author and programmer, and he’s quite a tall fellow. The walls are dry-built, the stones hand-placed with no concrete; a remarkable achievement. A we admired them, Tom Enebo said “And to think that ninjas can run right up there.” Bruce is convinced that the era of functional-programming...

I returned today from four days in Shimane prefecture (島根県); the occasion was RubyWorld Conference 2009. I came back with a few stories and a ton of pictures, so I’ll wrap the former around the latter for the next few days. While I’ve been going to Japan regularly since 1991, dozens of times and months in aggregate, I’d never previously managed to escape the Tokyo agglomeration, so this trip was a major thrill. Matsue (松江) was surprisingly less surprising than I’d braced for; more or less what one might think a small and fairly remote Japanese city might be like. The surprises I did encounter were fairly few and each has a story, which we’ll get to. Members of the Ruby community who aren’t offended by assiduous photography or meandering narratives may find this...

Seems the massive costs of the alarmist mantra are scaring the Japanese. The rest of us should be scared too.Japanese may balk at cost of 25 pct carbon cut -PMReuters, Friday May 29 2009TOKYO, May 29 (Reuters) - The high costs Japan would incur if Tokyo promises to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 would be hard for the public to accept during the recession, Prime Minister Taro Aso said on Friday.His comments showed there was still no consensus within the government after Environment Minister Tetsuo Saito said earlier this week that setting a mid-term target for cuts in a range of 15 to 25 percent was one option. [ID:nT207755]Aso has said he would announce Japan's mid-term target by mid-June, so he can set out Japan's views at a July meeting of G8 leaders...

This kind of sounds familiar. Doctor shortages in Japan's socialized medical system....

Offworld is reporting on a new video meme scouring Japan of such rare complexity and intricacies. The work being created rivals the libriaries of Kubrick, Bergman, Hasslehoff… oh who am I kidding? It’s a frigging Japanese MEME for godssakes. I have no clue why it came to be. Or why it’s taking off. I do know it makes me laugh as well as sing chomped up Japanese lyrics while I’m in the shower. Let’s start at the beginning: seems if you jiggle the game cartridge on N64’s Goldeneye the characters go fucking apeshit, as seen in the video below. Somewhere along the lines some smarmy Japanese kid added a soundtrack from their own country’s version of Rick Ashley and ta daaa! Meme! Note: if you’re going to make your own video, you have to make...

A happy birthday to His Imperial Majesty Emperor Akihito. HIM Emperor Akihitoand HIH Empress Michiko will soon be visiting Canada to mark the 80th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Canada and Japan. TOKYO (AFP) - Japanese Emperor Akihito turned 75 on Tuesday, pledging to work for the betterment of the imperial family as his worries about the state of the world's oldest monarchy inflict a toll on his own health.Akihito, recovering from illness, was seen in public for the first time in about two weeks as he greeted some 18,000 well-wishers in three appearances at the Imperial Palace."I have caused you all to worry since my health declined recently. But I believe I will recover gradually," he said from a balcony, flanked by Empress Michiko, Crown Prince Naruhito, his wife Masako...

Copyright © 2008 Miss604 - Rebecca Bollwitt. If you are not viewing this post through the Miss604.com feed then this content has been republished without permission. Visit the original article at http://www.miss604.com/2008/06/global-metal-movie-review-celebrating-canadian-film.html. Photo credit: Raul on Flickr We turned the corner from East Cordova onto Main Street and gathered under the brightly lit red marquee. Once past security we entered the lobby of the District 319 Theatre and were greeted by two lovely ladies, one of which was Marina from Row Three. We were handed a door prize ticket, a drink ticket, and a live band (Vancouver’s ENTROPIA) was already playing some metal that echoed out from the theatre and reverberated in our wine glass toting hands. Welcome to the First...

Reader adora turned me on to this series of McDonald’s ads from Japan. They’re to promote the Tomato McGrand, a sandwich that we’ve never heard of over here (for more obscure McMenu items from around the world, check out this feature I penned over at fjetsam). Of course, you can’t have a classy [...]...

Two very interesting articles this evening for your perusal. One is an AP report that goes into great length over how PC sales in Japan are declining quarter after quarter, representing 5 straight quarters of declining sales. The other is a PC World report that says this Christmas, PC sales, in particular, laptops, should be booming, and is in fact, part of a greater trend towards better sales — not only in the US, but also in Europe. While it would be tremendously tempting to say that Japan is a barometer for future technological trends (even more tempting to say ‘for all of Asia’, but that’s something that I wonder if South Korea has the title for), I think that its worth mentioning that the entire tech infrastructure in South East Asia is totally and entirely...

Apparently there are people in Japan who actually *live* in Net Cafe’s — they are clean, they are cheap, they serve food, *and* you can buy clean underwear (the non-school girl kind) if you so choose it.  Although such places were apparently built to have fun, kill time, and / or allow salarymen to hang out when they’ve missed the train, there is a distinct population of individuals who have actually chosen to live in them.  I read an article about this same phenomenon in the NYTimes or International Herald Tribune a few months ago but I can’t find the link.  The interesting thing now is that the Japanese Government is going to try and hammer out a study to try and figure out just how many of these net cafe “refugees” there actually are; the...

I just love Metafilter — I’m always coming across something I have never heard of before, which is one of my favourite things to do, and there are always lots of links to find out more about whatever it is. This time it was Sokushinbutsu, the mummified monks of Japan. Apparently hundreds of years ago, Buddhist monks would occasionally try to mummify themselves while they were still alive, by eating a special diet for several years and then drinking a special herbal tea that effectively embalmed them. Near the end, according to this article, the monk would be buried alive in a stone tomb with an air tube and a small bell, and when the bell stopped ringing they would be exhumed and then reburied for another few years before being put on display. Fascinating. More details here....

Before moving to Japan, I had had exactly one cup of tea in the 18 years, 1 month, and 20 odd days since I was born. It was from a pack I bought in Montreal’s Chinatown the previous year and it tasted like wet cardboard. Regardless, while I was in Japan I had more cups of different blends then I could possibly count. In one evening my host mom made seven or eight different types and we sat there sampling each of them for quite a while. They came from Asia, from Africa, from different regions and different plants. This was, however, still quite early in my stay, so it ended up being a lesson more in Japanese language than a tasting of world teas. But by the time my year was out I was doing much better. I knew my regular ocha from matcha, my uuroncha from my mugicha. I didn’t...

Lately I feel I’ve been playing Devil’s Advocate quite a bit. I just hope nobody’s been offended. I have a habit of disagreeing with almost anything anybody says. I do it for the sake of conversation, to flesh out the forgotten assumptions, and see how well people have really thought about what they say. And in the cases where someone is talking about something I actually believe in, I still do it, pointing out the same little problems that I struggle with to get some insight on how they might be resolved, for my own sake! I think I’m just being genuinely curious, but I have a feeling the other person sometimes thinks I’m just doing it because I’m an ass. Here’s an extreme example but a real one, for the sake of argument if you wish. I only read...

What happened was, I got an email from a Japanese colleague asking if I could come to an all-day meeting at the Sun EBC with the Open Source Software Society Shimane. I wrote back saying “Huh?” and he wrote back explaining that Shimane is a prefecture in Japan and that the delegation would include Yukihiro Matsumoto, also known as “Matz”, the designer of Ruby, who lives there, and that I’d been asked for. I wrote back saying “OK”, and now I want to go and visit Matsue, the capital city of Shimane, an hour’s flight from Tokyo. The Shimane delegation, nearly twenty strong, squeezed a bunch of visits into just four days in California. Back and forth across the Pacific in that time-frame is pretty grueling work; my hat is off to ’em. The Place To be honest I’d never...