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Minding manners while the sky bursts with color

A detail from an ad asking revelers to the Sumidagawa Fireworks festival to mind certain manners, Yomiuri Shinbun, July 25, 2003: click for larger image (49K)

Today is the Sumida River Fireworks Festival, probably the biggest of the many fireworks festivals held in the Tokyo area during the summer. Certainly it’s also one of the oldest, dating back to 1733. In advance of the festival, Japan real estate giant Mitsui Fudosan published a full-page ad in yesterday’s Yomiuri Shinbun, featuring 16 different postcards in an ukiyo-e iroha-karuta style, all in one way of another exemplifying the sort of “manners” revelers should mind when they go to the festival. (Trivia about Mitsui Fudosan: their investment helped open Tokyo Disneyland in the early 80’s, and they were behind the now-closed Ski Dome in Chiba, the largest indoor ski facility in the world).

Examples of good manners include taking public transportation, taking one’s trash with them, and using the bathroom before you go to the festival, etc. The one I’ve scanned above I thought was particularly cute. It says (roughly) “Be sure to praise equally both the fireworks and your lover as ‘beautiful’.”

Below is Hiroshige’s oft-reproduced but still dazzling woodblock print of the fireworks festival, circa 1856:

Utagawa Hiroshige's 'Fireworks at Ryogoku' woodblock print: click for larger image (85K)

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Japanese blogs and blog wars

I’ve often lamented about my sidebar of Japan-based blogs being so English-language centric, and expat heavy. Needless to say there are a lot of bloggers in Japan who are writing in Japanese, and I haven’t really found a way to incorporate them into the list, not the least because my limited Japanese would never allow me to keep such a list updated. Fortunately, Japan-Japan has started a “Bloggers in Japan Writing Exclusively in Japanese” list of links page, currently listing 175 blogs, along with some translation sites for those who can’t read Japanese. I’m sure this is just the tip of a bigger iceberg, so if you know of sites not represented on the list, please let them know.

Related to this, Ken Loo, who maintains blogs in both English and Japanese, recently wrote an interesting piece further exploring whether or not blogging is becoming popular in Japan. [Update (July 29, 2003): Ken has re-done his English blog and this article is no longer available.] Furthermore, Ken writes about how a whole community of web diarists or “text site” keepers that existed in Japan before weblog software applications like Movable Type became available here has resented the way that their community has been usurped, so to speak. I don’t know the ins and outs of it, though the whole thing strikes me as a bit childish (kind of a music fan bragging about how he saw so and so back in the day, in a small club, before anyone knew who they were, etc.). At any rate, JBA (Japan Blogging Association), which was sort of a list of mostly Movable Type blogs, has closed (there’s an ominous looking — but unreadable to me — message at the site), apparently a casualty of this so-called burogu soudou (“blog war”).