Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Japan in Pictures

Okay, here's the deal with blogging.  I'm back in business, but only sporadically.  We can connect a computer (not mine) to the internet, involving some witch doctoring, and I can get pics off my memory card.  Techies, you can feel my pain; the situation is that the setup here is a separate modem and router - modem issued by the isp and wireless router bought separately.  The router is experiencing tremendous problems, but there is no support for it in existence in English.  I would love to help my friend upgrade the firmware, but it turns out I only know how to support these things in one language.

So here goes, a bunch of pictures!

 Here's the giant squid at the prefectural museum!  Soooo huge!

This part of the museum was like a love song to taxidermy and preservation.  It was really interesting, but the mothball smell got to be a bit much.  There were a lot of pinned bugs, too, and many of you will be totally unsurprised to find out that I took pictures of pretty much every insect display.  I will not inflict them upon you here, gentle readers.



This is in the history section of the prefectural museum.  It's a kirin outfit - they're a big deal around here, since they presumably live in the hills.  I guess they chill with dragons and such.  There's also kirin on a bunch of things throughout town - carved benches up and down the main street.  I was disappointed that Cale has not named all the benches and given them personalities.  I would.





This is the Hiroshima Peace Park memorial arch.  Through it, you can see the Genbaku Dome, preserved as it appeared after the bomb exploded almost directly above it.  I have now traveled - although indirectly - from the place the atomic bomb was born to the first place it was used as a weapon.  And if that's not freaky, I don't know what is.











 Here's the big torii gate at Miyajima.  People used to have to boat through this in order to be pure enough to set foot on the island.  We came by ferry, unpurified, and I hope the various kami and spirits understood.  We went under some other gates getting there, so maybe we weren't too terribly unclean.

Miyajima is serious business though - one of those big holy spots with a very long history of being holy.  It's also frigging gorgeous.



 Here's Cale stalking one of the Miyajima "wild" deer.  They are supposedly notorious for eating lunches and ferry tickets, but mostly they seemed sleepy when we were there.

The brochure warns that they were wild animals.  I've met wild deer, and these ain't them.  These were spoiled, entitled, FAT deer.






I totally hiked all the way to the top of this.  Heck yeah.
Here is a snake friend I met on the way up.  Snake friend was like three feet long.  I wanted more photos, but she was camera shy, so I didn't get much.


Here is the other friend I met.  This friend is about two inches (three-inch wingspan) of stinging death.  The story of this encounter goes as follows:

A couple years ago, I watched some nature special that introduced me to the concept of Japanese Giant Hornets.  I had encountered the name before, when I was trying to identify some monstrously large wasps eating our apricots, but hadn't paid attention since we were in Albuquerque, not Japan.  But the show I watched described in horrific detail their propensity for savaging hives of honey bees, which European honey bees have no natural defense for, and how if you stumble into a nest of these hornets, you are pretty much dead.  I have always feared wasps - I have been stung by them on numerous occasions - and so the thought of the uberwasp really scared me.  But I consoled myself with the knowledge that I was terribly unlikely to find myself wandering through rural Japan.  Ha ha.

Cale warned me about the bears, boars, snakes, and poisonous caterpillars in the mountains, but when you get right down to it, nothing is as likely to kill you as these freaking wasps.  But I figured my chance of seeing such a thing was pretty slim.  I wasn't going off path, I wasn't out looking or anything...

So I was almost all the way down the mountain and I noticed raspberries. "Wow, raspberries!" I went, and leaned in to see how extensive the bramble was.  It sounded like there was a small animal moving around in there somewhere.  A sparrow, maybe?  Mouse?  Another snake friend?  Then I heard a sound like a small jet engine, and the creature pictured above hovered out of the bramble.  "Oh shit," says I, articulate and relaxed, as one would expect.  "Oh shit oh shit.  Is that really... oh shit."

Hornet had his own business to be about, though, and once I got over the fact that I was seeing an insect from my nightmares, I thought I'd better document the occasion.  Sorry it isn't the best picture, but I was remaining 8 feet away at all times, because... well, look at it.

3 comments:

  1. That horrible hornet is really quite horrible.

    Your description of the deer reminds me of the prairie dogs in the Tucson Desert Museum. I'm fairly convinced that any pampered "wild" herbivore will go Fatty McFatfat given the chance, like so much Kiki.

    Your snake friend is most likely a species of Beauty Snake, going on that stripe of eyeliner.

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  2. Wow, giant wasps... so much for sleep. That image will haunt me for the rest of my life...

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  3. Jeeeeeezus. Scary giant hornet. And orange!!!

    I totally fed some 'wild' deer in Japan, at some park that must've had 18937248972 of them (Nagoya? Nara? N-someplace, had lots of 'wild' deer.), and they just come right up to you and eat out of your palm, and were as fat as a pregnant cow. Wild my ass. *lol*

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