Category: travel
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Sights from traveling northern Japan
In writing my newsletter I gathered up all the photos I posted this month from our summer break trip in Tohoku. I thought I should just post the photo round up here, and I can give a little a bit of context for the images. This trip was my first this far north. I had…
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Driving Fukushima: The 3/11 nuclear disaster 12 years later
See the first part of this travelogue on Iwate and the tsunami Speeding along the highway along the gently curving coast of the Sendai plain, we enter the more hilly Fukushima Prefecture from its northernmost border. Immediately we are greeted with a new road sign: a sensor displaying the amount of radiation in microsieverts per…
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Driving Iwate: The 3/11 tsunami 12 years later
3/11: the triple disaster in March of 2011 when the world’s fourth largest earthquake since 1900 caused a massive tsunami to ravage the northeastern coast of Japan, triggering three nuclear reactors to meltdown, the deaths of nearly 30,000 people, and displacement of nearly 300,000. Twelve years later 3/11 still weighs on all of Japan, but…
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Tanegashima Island: A strategic casualty
The day we flew out of the “cosmoport” of Tanegashima, a remote island (ritō) off the southern coast of Kyushu, was actually historically significant. Not because of my presence of course.
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“Truly Asia” Pt 2: Melaka
Read Part 1 “Kuala Lumpur” here → It took about two and a half hours to reach Melaka from the busy bus depot in southern Kuala Lumpur. We had loaded up on snacks and sandwiches for our lunchtime departure, just liking getting the “ekiben” or packed lunches in Japan before getting on the Shinkansen for…
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“Truly Asia” Pt 1: Kuala Lumpur
PREFACE: this is a whirlwind post meant to give you the tiniest sliver of context for the accompanying photos which I hope you have a spin through. They are at the bottom of the post. Back in about 2018 my wife and I started talking about living in a third country for a while. My…
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Traveling the familiar
When I was a kid there was a lakeside campground we went to each summer. Dad would load up the camper with beach toys and we would migrate south for a week. My cousins would met us there for a few days, but there were also these kids from other towns and cities that would…
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Impressions of Lisbon
My first trip to Europe was pretty easy. Not the getting there — that part was actually pretty difficult. I flew through Heathrow, but leaving Haneda the plane flew east over the Pacific Ocean, north between Kamchatka and Alaska, through the Bering Straight and then over the Arctic. In order to avoid Russian airspace four…
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Visiting the Kyoto State Guest House
A few years ago one of the members of Writers in Kyoto shared a broadcast from NHK’s Core Kyoto S05E02 Kyoto State Guest House: Hospitality Imbued with Beauty and Craftsmanship. This is a special compound located in the Kyoto Imperial Palace but run by the Cabinet Office. It is where the Japanese government receives foreign…
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Unzen – Where foreigners go to hell to cool off
From a tiny speck on the horizon, the volcano slow grew as I crossed first the mud flats of Kumamoto and then the shallow waters of the Ariake Sea. Now, at the foot of the volcano, looming over the small city of Shimabara, there was only one way to go: up! Unzen, the central volcano…