Who knows how long I’ve loved you, you know I love you still. Will I wait a lonely lifetime? If you want me to I will.
– The Beatles
Far too many mosquitoes in here, buzzing around and biting my arms and legs. Ugh.
See more Japanese ruins (haikyo) in the galleries:
[album id=4 template=compact]See world ruins in the ruins gallery.
While meandering through Kichijoji recently I spied these cute Japangrish welcome mats.
Outside a cello shop.
Outside a tanning salon.
See more of my Strange Japan content here.
. . . I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul. In my degradation I have not been so degraded but that the sight of you with your father, and of this home made such a home by you, has stirred old shadows that I thought had died out of me. Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.
– Charles Dickens
See more Japanese ruins (haikyo) in the galleries:
[album id=4 template=compact]See world ruins in the ruins gallery.
I had never drunk pumpkin in my life before today. I wonder if anybody else has? If you’ve spent any time in Japan there’s a good chance you’ve eaten a fair bit of it, both savory and sweet. You may have had it in ice cream, you may have had good old Pumpkin Pie (though that’s surely more American), or you may have had Pumpkin Purin.
Have you drunk it though?
From the front art it’s pretty hard to tell this is a Pumpkin drink, though if you look top right you’ll see the green lid of a pumpkin. The Japanese typically eat green pumpkins. Do we also eat green pumpkins? Here they only use the orange ones for display, they’re not that easy to find and buy. I bought ours from a supermarket- it was on display, had already been inked with a scary face, and I negotiated with them for it for 1,000 yen. SY made us a great pie out of it.
The titling says Soft Pumpkin Custard Pudding Sweet Vegetable Drink, plus something about caramel.
Here’ the back.
Here you can better see the pumpkin chunks. I know you’re looking at them and thinking you’d like to drink them. Put them in a blender and drink them down. Of course you are.
Here it is, decanted. It looked a little goopy, and I didn’t much fancy drinking it. Very little scent. I’m sure it’s gone already from most convenience stores- probably it was just on release in time for Halloween, when everyone goes bat-shit crazy for pumpkins.
The taste in the end was very mild. Since eating SY’s pumpkin pie I have a pretty good idea of what pumpkin should taste like, and it’s not what this drink tasted like. All I could get was the bitter tang of caramel- pretty typical of Japanese purin (custard pudding).
Until next Halloween, then…
See more of my Strange Japan content here.
Leave sound in an empty
house in its own room there. . . .
– William Stafford
I stood in the room silently and wondered; are these shadows the same shadows I’ll see in five years, in ten, in fifty? Will I recognize them? Will they recognize me?
See more Japanese ruins (haikyo) in the galleries:
[album id=4 template=compact]You can also see a curation of world ruins in the ruins gallery.
In the window of a hairdressers in Kichijoji, Japan. Because even the Hulkster needs to get a cut.
Though he has more hair in the cartoon.
See more of my Strange Japan content here.
The Myth of Tomorrow is an epic painting by renowned Japanese painter Taro Okamoto. It is massive, 30 meters long and 5.5 high, painted some 43 years ago, lost for 31 of those, and now on permanent display in Shibuya Station.
On display in Shibuya station.
I first saw the Myth of Tomorrow (Asu no Shinwa) in 2007, when it was on display at the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art. I was on a museum-going jag at that time, and had been to the Taro Okamoto Museum of Art just a little while earlier- so I knew a bit about Okamoto. He was heavily influenced by Picasso, and wanted to bring a Japanese flavor to that kind of surrealism. Myth of Tomorrow, his largest work, could be his answer to Picasso’s Guernica.
Guernica
Asu no Shinwa
The Myth of Tomorrow depicts the mass destruction and suffering experienced after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The central figure, afire and skeletalized, certainly harks to some of the photographs of victims of that time- see some of the photos in the Hiroshima Memorial Museum. Guernica was also about bombing, by Spanish nationalist forces of the town of Guernica in 1937.
Hiroshima art.
The painting was painted for a Mexican hotel in 1967, but when the hotel went bankrupt it was lost. In 2003 it was recovered, though the details of where it was for all that time are unclear. It’s quite enormous, so would have been difficult to hide.
Last week I saw it on display on the wall in the passage between the Inokashira line and JR lines in Shibuya Station. Wow. what a great use of art- put it somewhere in public where everybody can see it. Nice job, the government.
See more of my Strange Japan content here.
In the dark room a cloud of yellow dust flew from beneath the tool like a scatter of sparks from under the hooves of a galloping horse. The twin wheels turned and hummed. Binet was smiling, his chin down, his nostrils distended. He seemed lost in the kind of happiness which, as a rule, accompanies only those mediocre occupations that tickle the intelligence with easy difficulties, and satisfy it with a sense of achievement beyond which there is nothing left for dreams to feed on.
– Gustave Flaubert
See more Japanese ruins (haikyo) in the galleries:
[album id=4 template=compact]See world ruins in the ruins gallery.
For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.
– H. P. Lovecraft ‘The Picture in the House’
Gan Kutsu Cliff Face Hotel in Saitama
See more on the Gan Kutsu Hotel:
See more Japanese ruins (haikyo) in the galleries:
[album id=4 template=compact]You can also see a curation of world ruins in the ruins gallery.
Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father’s name; Piled high, packed large, where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning’s dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!
– Elizabeth Barret Browning
See more Japanese ruins (haikyo) in the galleries:
[album id=4 template=compact]See world ruins in the ruins gallery.
