hmmn

It’s the start of the Aki (Fall) Sumo tournament here in Tokyo and after more or less taking the last basho off, I can feel myself getting back into the swing of things, and look forward to making it down to the Kokugikan for at least one if not two days of action this basho. [...]

Naoko and I took Kaika to Hibiya Koen yesterday, where this weekend are events related to the 400th anniversay of the start of the Edo period. On the way home we stopped by the Imperial Hotel, which neither of Naoko nor I had been in before. I of course knew that there had been a [...]

The above is a cropped detail from a print entitled “Knowing the blessings of one’s parents,” by an unknown artist perhaps in 1882. The complete print depicts, from right to left, the 10 months of pregancy (above are months 4 to 7). This print comes from an online exhibition of ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock prints) and [...]

Above are two pages of manga by the originator of the term, ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai. I bought these yesterday for 3,000 yen ($24 USD) at Hara Shobo in Kanda-Jimbocho (I wrote briefly about this gallery here). I had been considering buying one of the gallery’s two-page spreads of manga sketches by Hokusai for a [...]

I was going to write a longer parenthetical comment in my previous post about this archive, but I was so taken with it that I thought it deserved its own post. Now I may be on to something the rest of the world knows about, but I was quite shocked at coming upon the Rare [...]

Well, I never see anyone comment on their 6-month anniversary of anything, it does strike me as sort of lame, but excuse me while I indulge in a bit of lame-ness and pat myself on the back for having survived my first 6 months in Japan. My 6-month anniversary was last Friday, inauspiciously on a [...]