Day of the Dead

First things first. It's been brought to my attention that the venerable Matt Cosnett of Nambu fame has posted a video of the Nebuta Festival on his soon to be famous blog. It's very well put together, if I may say so myself and does a good job of encapsulating the madness of grown men and women jumping around and yelling in funny costumes. The video also appears to feature some type of indie pop music, so you need not worry about losing any scene points by clicking on the link.

I don't understand how sushi is priced at the supermarket. I have observed that there are "cheap" days and "expensive" days but the reasoning behind this remains a mystery to me. I'm going to be in Aomori City for three days this week and I don't get paid until I get back, so in an effort to conserve funds I dined on cheap sushi and pre-made ginger noodles tonight. Luckily, even the really cheap pre-made food in Japan seems to be quite palatable.

Perhaps I didn't mention this before but this week in Japan marks the holiday where people honor their ancestors by visiting their graves and leaving offerings. They also apparently celebrate by lighting fireworks, which I can currently hear going off all around the neighborhood. Unlike America, though, their fireworks are pretty low key. They don't seem to approach the celebration of holidays with explosives with quite the same ethos as we tend to ("What better way to celebrate you country's independence than by blowing up a small piece of it?").


On the TV, they're contrasting images of Japanese children eating ice cream and such with footage from on the ground in Iraq. They even have a television drama here about a Japanese reporter in Iraq who dies in the line of fire. It's funny that America is the only nation in the world that seems intent on waging war while hiding the reality of what that actually means from its citizens. This is especially ironic in the face of American scholarship that's obsessed with representing the Japanese as having never owned up to their actions as wartime aggressors in public discourse. On a related note, you may recall that some of the only investigative reporting on depleted uranium usage in the first Gulf War was published in Japan by Akira Tashiro, a reporter for the Chugoku Shimbun. Unsurprisingly, they've had quite a bit of difficulty trying to get his book published Stateside. An English translation is available through Transnet however, for those who are interested.

This spider situation is really getting out of hand. The day before yesterday I cleared out all the spider webs within a 5 foot radius of my door with a shovel. Today, my door is again completely encased in finely woven silk. Just a few minutes ago, I was greeted by a spider literally the size of a silver dollar, just outside my door. However, in the time it took me to run and grab my camera, it had disappeared. Eerie.

I think I've decided that Muji is by far my favorite store in Japan. It's true that this is in no small part owed to the fact that they are one of the few places that accepts my Visa card, allowing me to pretend that I'm not broke for a fleeting instant. But they also have basically everything you could ever need, from cardigans to popcorn, all at fairly reasonable prices. Well, reasonable for Japan, anyway.

This little kid at the supermarket was smiling at me today and when I waved at him, he started grinning from ear to ear. That really made my day.