The size of Lake Michigan compared to Northern Japan
Reading Time: < 1 minute Most of the Tohoku (northeast) region of Honshu Japan could fit in Lake Michigan.
Continue reading →Reading Time: < 1 minute Most of the Tohoku (northeast) region of Honshu Japan could fit in Lake Michigan.
Continue reading →Reading Time: 2 minutes Getting treated to an oyster snack on my 400-mile hitchhike adventure in Northern Japan.
Continue reading →Reading Time: < 1 minute Mr. Murata playing his handmade shakuhachi On June 22, 2012, Mr. and Mrs. Murata picked me up from Nikaho, Akita Prefecture, and invited me to drink tea with them in their home in Akita city. Mr. Murata’s hobby is making and playing a musical instrument made from bamboo which is called Shakuhachi. Mrs. Murata plays the Koto, a stringed instrument. I was honored to be their guest and hear them … Continue reading →
Reading Time: 9 minutes Mr. and Mrs. Sakura in their living room Sunday, June 10, 2012: I hitchhiked 404 kilometers (253 miles) from Aomori Prefecture to Niigata City in 9 cars. They consisted of 4 married couples, two small children, 4 single men, 2 ladies and one single couple. A highlight of this trip was visiting Mr. and Mrs. Sakurada’s home in Noshiro. They picked me up when hitchhiking exactly one month before on … Continue reading →
Reading Time: < 1 minute I recently visited a good friend who is an artist, William Henry. He is offering high resolution DVDs of his artwork for $99 US. Anybody interested? The below is a couple low resolution samples of some of the artwork.
Continue reading →Reading Time: 2 minutes Visit Hirosaki Park in Aomori Japan to see beautiful cherry blossoms.
Continue reading →Reading Time: 3 minutes A dear lady friend in the USA urged me to listen to hours 2 and 3 of the March 27, 2012 Power Hour radio show broadcast hosted by Joyce Riley. She was afraid that I and my family were in extreme and imminent danger due to nuclear radiation contamination. She knows I live in an area that is neighbor to Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. After listening to what Joyce Riley and … Continue reading →
Reading Time: < 1 minute Just take a very close look at the figure and describe what you see! Click it to see an enlargement. Clicking the enlargement will make it yet larger to see more detail. The figure is courtesy of Dr. Nakasato from Nagoya. I was introduced to him through my friend, Yoko Ishikawa of Tokyo. As you can see, major features of Japan are relatively close in position to those features of … Continue reading →
Reading Time: 3 minutes One of my jobs is doing text translations on PC from Japanese to English. I use Google translate in the process, but only as a double check to make sure I didn’t miss any phrases or words. I found Google does a fairly decent job translating Indo-European languages. I studied Russian and discovered that Google is OK to translate texts such as emails in Russian. An example from Bible text … Continue reading →
Reading Time: 3 minutes An attempt to visit the damaged nuclear power plants in Fukushima, Japan.
Continue reading →Reading Time: 2 minutes I had three books I wished to present as a gift to a VIP Japanese friend. I intended to give them as is without any formal wrapping paper to cover them, but my Japanese secretary suggested that they be wrapped together in a bundle with decorative wrapping paper. The secretary had only a couple minutes for the job and it looked rather haphazardly done. “Just tell her you did it!” … Continue reading →
Reading Time: 2 minutes In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. — Genesis 1:1 What a profound statement the Holy Bible makes in the authorized version of the Holy Bible (King James Version of 1611) in its very first verse! The Creator not only made matter (atoms and molecules), He not only made space between them (heaven) but He also created TIME! — (in the beginning). I consider it a universal … Continue reading →
Reading Time: 2 minutes Last night at 11:32 PM while in bed in my home in Niigata near the Sea of Japan, I felt a relatively strong earthquake. The building shook for a considerable amount of time. It is not common for earthquakes to occur on the west side of Japan, and because of the duration of the quake, I thought it may have occurred on the Pacific side near the previous earthquake of … Continue reading →
Reading Time: < 1 minute This is a photo I took of my little girl, Lily, then 4 years old, when we lived in Kamakura city Kanagawa prefecture. The photo is on the Shonan coast, near Inamuragasaki. I was taken with black and white film, and developed and printed personally by me. Back in those days I did a lot of B/W photography with my 35 MM Minolta SLR, and had the availability of a … Continue reading →
Reading Time: < 1 minute I would like to thank Darryl Rollins in the USA for sending $20 toward the relief fund. This is the first donation via Paypal from a person who saw this web site. Darryl’s donation will be part of other donations listed on Help Japan 2011 of which yours truly is the webmaster. I previously had my Paypal button on that site, but was asked to take it off because my … Continue reading →
Reading Time: < 1 minute Fukushima Daiichi (meaning #1) Nuclear Plant My brother Mike sent me the following link: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/13/world/asia/satellite-photos-japan-before-and-after-tsunami.html Each photo has a slider in the middle. Move the slider back and forth by putting your mouse pointer in the middle of the center bar and holding down the left mouse button, and you will see the tremendous difference and amount of destruction caused by the earthquake and tsunami. Simply awful! Seeing the difference … Continue reading →
Reading Time: 2 minutes The left arrow points to my location and the right one is the location of one of the nuclear power plants in trouble. Two days ago I was finally able to contact a friend in Sendai, the largest city closest to the epicenter. He said that he and his family are OK and that their apartment building had only minor damage. Dishes have fallen off the shelf and many were … Continue reading →
Reading Time: < 1 minute The Tohoku or Northeast area of Japan is about the size of Lake Michigan. The earthquake moved this massive amount of land 2.4 m (8 ft) east into the Pacific! That’s what caused the tsunami that killed 19,759 people. It was an auspicious time for me to come to Osaka after the earthquake. I was contacted by a friend, Josh DeSantis, the chairman of Hiyaku28 NPO, to come to Kobe … Continue reading →
Reading Time: < 1 minute I’ve been calling all my friends, especially the ones that live close to the earthquake epicenter near Sendai, Japan. Nobody I know was hurt during the earthquake in the slightest. Everybody in Northern Japan experienced the shocks of the quake, but nobody was close enough to the coast to be affected by the tsunami. My family in Niigata reports that they all went outside during the earthquake, but then went … Continue reading →
Reading Time: 2 minutes The pointer on the left points to where I lived in Niigata City, and the pointer on the left is where the Fukushima nuclear reactors are that were damaged by the earthquake and tsunami. March 11, 2011: At 2:46 PM local Japan time I was sitting in a MacDonald’s in Sangenjaya, only two train stops from Shibuya, a major commercial center of Tokyo. An earthquake began shaking the building. There … Continue reading →