Hitachi Family Snapshots No. 3

Continuing with more snapshots from Hitachi, this time of my mother-in-law, who was born and raised there. In the first image, she is standing on the site of the house she grew up in, a company house rented from Hitachi Mine, who her father worked for. The house was razed many many years ago. The second photo was taken at the location of her old elementary school, and the third across the street from one of the Mine’s old complexes. While I was taking some pictures she went up an embankment and pulled these stalks out of the ground and started munching on them, like a kid.

Mother-in-law, Hitachi, May 4, 2003 (71K)

Mother-in-law and grandson, Hitachi, May 4, 2003 (41K)

Mother-in-law, Hitachi, May 5, 2003 (54K)

Six weblogs from Japan-based American students

In light of the group blog Tawawa that I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve come across 6 weblogs of students who have been studying in Japan during the Spring semester, housed under the umbrella site the East Asia Center:

Andy Clark: Understanding Japanese Youth Culture Through the Interview
Austin Damiani: Cultivating Interdisciplinary Synthesis
John Grillo: Explorations in Learning Music in Japan
Abi Iverson: Developing My Artistic Self
Jaymie Wisneski: Understanding the Process of Artistic Creation
Rachel Winckler

Welcome to our cooperative blogging project! We are six university students studying abroad in Kyoto, through Friends World Program, an experiential learning center affiliated with Long Island University. This semester, five of us are experimenting with computer supported cooperative learning to carry out action research projects of our own. In combination with weekly face-to-face meetings, we will each be running our own blogs and cooperating with each other’s projects.

Sadly, it looks like I’m too late to this party, as the “The Semester is Over!” posts I found would seem to indicate. I’m not sure where these blogs will go from here, but at the very least, I recommend perusing the archives for each of these blogs, as I found some interesting analyses and takes on Japan and Japanese culture therein.

All the images from space you could want

Here’s a mind-boggling (heh, I first typed “bloggling”) collection of images from space that’s probably old news to most, courtesy of NASA and the Johnson Space Center. There are a variety of ways to search for images. My favorite, if for nothing else then it’s one of the most detailed search pages I’ve seen in a long while, is the Technical Search. If you so choose, in addition to geographic location, you can select the particular space mission the image was taken on, specify longitude and latitude coordinates, minimum and maximum focal length of the camera lens, what camera was used to take the image, and the type of film.

A search on “Japan” resulted in over 3000 images. I did a slightly refined search on “Fuji” and found some nice images, including this one, which I was then able to request a large (and free) 1.8MB file of, just by filling out a simple form. After resizing in Photoshop, it’s now being used as my desktop wallpaper.

(Via M A R K K A)