Yumi and I checked out the Nikkei Garden Farmer’s Market this morning at the Nikkei National Museum and Culural Centre, just up the hill from our place in south Burnaby, BC.
Yumi got some plants and a bag full of used Japanese novels.
There’s an excellent exhibition in the gallery on women in STEM.
Yumi participated in the Aizome Indigo Dye Workshop at the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre in Burnaby today.
Here is her creation, anchoring an updated foyer display at our front door.
I love Japanese indigo, be it Noren, clothing, etc. . .
Our TV habits have changed over the last year.
For years we were heavily into all the NCISes, Hawaii Five 0s, etc. Haven’t watched any of those for a year or more.
Don’t miss them.
We’ve been watching a lot more nature shows over the last year. Many on TV Japan. Mind-blowing videography and research featuring weeks, months, and years spent observing species of wildlife.
We watch happy/goofy Japanese shows on multi-generational families. Not dramas, real families.
A washi papermaker who is the 13th generation at his craft. . . A potter who is in the seventh generation of trying over and over and over to replicate a long-lost style of pottery.
We watch slow-paced series on travel in Japan that focus on regional and local arts, and crafts, and food. Travel by train, travel by bicycle. . . And always amazing food, lovingly grown, cooked, and presented. . .
We watch “Somewhere Street,” a Japanese show in which a crew visits famous cities around the world and documents major historic and tourist attractions, food, music, nightlife. . .
It’s people. It’s nature. It’s life.
I enjoyed a visit to the Kamui Mintara Playground of the Gods on Burnaby Mountain despite the rain and cold.
We dropped into Olympic on our last Japan trip a few years ago.
There’s been a lot of chat about the anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I have visited Hiroshima several times and Nagasaki once. I have read many accounts of the horrors. I lived in Japan for 14 years and loved it.
But I always was uncomfortable with Japanese denial of any horrors that they perpetrated in the war.
There was never any mention of Japan’s imperialistic invasions of east and south Asia. Or the thousands of so-called “comfort women” of several Asian countries forced into servicing the Japanese army every place it invaded.
Any call for such recognition was met with threats of violence from right-wing Japanese groups, and that continues to this day.
While accurate numbers are hard to establish, the Japanese Imperial Army likely raped, tortured, and killed more civilians in the Nanjing Massacre alone than combined civilian deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The conventional battles of the Pacific at places like Okinawa were also horrific, with a pervasive “fight to the last man” blindness by the Japanese army and marines. The Japanese military pressed local civilians into service, and it’s documented that civilians were forced to commit mass suicide by the Japanese military instead of being allowed to give up.
History is complex and complicated. Times and attitudes are always changing. Is there any point in debating the degree of horror of this massacre, to that genocide, to this bombing, to that. . .
I don’t know. But I believe that mass amnesia and denial is a slippery slope.
Japan has never had a Willy Brandt moment. . .
We blew past our weekly grocery budget down at the dock in Steveston, BC with this beauty, and a bag of BC spot prawns.
We will slowly savour the steaks now and then for months to come.
Yumi will salt and freeze them in individual portions for Japanese-style breakfasts and for making onigiri.
We admired this gorgeous salmon before I carved it up.
Color Me True
Sweet story, with giggles and moistening eyes now and then.
I can’t put my finger on it, but if Hollywood did this it would likely be over-the-top silly.
But there’s a tradition in Japanese film for understatement.
This could have been a really sappy movie, and yes, it is a goofy, tear-jerking romance, but it all came together, at least for us.
It was also fun to try to pick up on visual references in homage to films from long ago.
Much of the theme is the power of film to transport us to other places, and the struggle that writers have to achieve moving, engaging scripts that leave an audience fulfilled.
BTW, the movie poster is little like the film, which is all about B&W slowly blossoming toward muted colors. ..
One of my “nieces” (cousin’s daughter) is starting a project documenting all the plastics used in her life. That got me thinking about our trip to Japan last year when one day we went to the Sea of Japan coast in Aomori Prefecture.
The views were spectacular, but once you got up close, there were piles of plastic garbage strewn all over the beach. Much of the crap was not Japanese, but had floated in from other countries across the sea.
It occurred to me that I’d never posted these photos to my blog, so here they are. Shot in April 2019.
And then this. . .
Yes, still more photos from our Japan trip last year. I think I just posted a few of this site before, and here’s a broader set.
The Bando German Prisoner of War camp on the island of Shikoku, Japan. The place was nearly deserted in spring 2019.
German soldiers captured in WWI were kept here under incredibly tolerant conditions. The Japanese camp commander was way ahead of his time (and apparently stubbornly opposed to harsher conditions and constraints proposed by higher command).
The prisoners were allowed to fraternize with locals, hold musical concerts, etc. Some even chose to stay rather than be repatriated when WWI ended.
The area still has strong connections to Germany.
It was interesting to note some Slavic names on some of the monuments — European powers incorporated conscripts from assorted holdings into their ranks.
Some info here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…/Band%C5%8D_prisoner-of-war_camp
