Farewell, NaBloPoMo!

At last, the end has come. Thirty days of late nights, sleepy fingers pounding at the keys, blurry eyes proofreading pages and pages of similar-looking words. Had I been in high school, my English teacher would be proud. But now I am the English teacher. Or rather, I was. Now there is no English teacher. Perhaps that is the ultimate state of transcendence... First you are the student, then you are the teacher, and then you realize that there is no teacher.

Whoa.

So I thought it would be cool to present a bunch of funky graphs at the end of the month, colorfully presenting data and trends that meant next to nothing to next to no one. I was going to crank them out on Matlab at work before I came home tonight, but...

As I sleepily walked back up into my lab after a delicious meal of soboro ankake tofu, I was shocked to my senses by an acrid smell of burning electronics! If you know what that smells like, I'm sorry for you, because it almost inevitably means something very bad. However, it's one thing when it's a $300 stereo system or a $1000 home computer, but this was a lab full of $200,000 robots, and that smell could mean something very, very bad. What's worse, I was unable to identify which robot the smell was coming from. I cut the power to my two robots, but wasn't sure what to do with the others... I had never worked with those models before, and they were being frantically prepared for a demo, so I wasn't sure whether simply unplugging them wouldn't do irreversible damage.

Two of the other researchers were still downstairs eating, and three others were asleep at their desks, passed out after several days of sleep deprivation, no doubt. I roused one of them, explained the situation, and sprinted downstairs to alert the others. We came running back up to find the others crowded around two robots. Screwdrivers were already in hand, parts from inside the robot quickly accumulating on the floor, while one of the researchers was scanning the robots with an infrared video camera that I suspect is more expensive than any object I have ever owned.

Over time the acrid smell was vented away, and all of the robots had been off for long enough that it became a meticulous search through motherboards, power supplies, motor controller boards, and other parts to try to identify what had been burning. I went back to my robot and ran a few last tests of my code before I hopped on my bike and headed home through the rice fields, completely forgetting about my ambition of preparing cool Matlab graphs for my final NaBloPoMo post.

At home, without Matlab or Excel, I turned to some random web-based service that generates 3D graphs for you, and I put together but a single one of the many graphs I had in mind. I was thinking about plotting things like word count vs. day of the week, number of photos vs. number of comments, and things like that, but I decided to cut the scope down to just this graph:



I wanted to put in separate entries for Hong Kong and Germany, since some of my very good friends live there, but (a) the graph-making service limits you to six categories, and (b) they clearly don't read my blog as often as my AWESOME friends in Canada and France! :P

Haha, then again, it may have been just Kern's Canadian friends, and my Canadian friends don't love me anymore. Damn Canadians... you think they're your friends and then they turn around and stab you in the back. Okay, three deep breaths... ... ... I won't rip on Canada tonight, I won't rip on Canada tonight, I won't rip on Canada tonight.

Hehe, it would be awesome, though, if BC had a separate top-level domain from the rest of Canada. Then I could really know who was reading my blog and who was ignoring me. :P

Ok, so anyway, this is my last post of NaBloPoMo, and I (unlike Kern) haven't thought anything through, since I'm really concentrating on starting to organize all my stuff so that this move in January doesn't kill me. There were lots of things I was thinking of writing about. For example:

• Why iTunes 7.02 has destroyed any last shred of hope I ever had that there is any morality in the corporate world


• The deep significance of the analog and the digital, and how the desire of humanity to dominate nature blinds us to acceptance of true beauty and balance


• How the blind application of technology without deep thought to its consequences is inherently evil, and why we should reexamine the responsibilities of scientists and engineers


• The nasty gray fungus stuff that somehow invaded my apartment over the summer and got into everything, and how truly nasty it is, although I think I've finally cleaned up the last major infestations of it


• A rant on how computers are fundamentally unusable and some thoughts on how to help humanity deal with how much they suck


• A sappy reflection on how awesome my friends are, and a bunch of pictures of happy memories with them


• A slightly ironic reflection on how much I love singing with Utaurara 6, juxtaposed with the facts that our musical tastes are COMPLETELY contradictory to each other and the social dynamics of the group are so strange


• Some sort of soul-searching, wandering blabber about finding love, followed by some cynical comments that aren't bitter, but are somewhat less-than-optimistic


• Reflections on cleaning my room and uncovering bank statements, junk mail, and old love letters


• A bulleted list of meta-blog-posts, so that I don't actually have to post about all those things since you would all skim anyway!

I'm pretty certain everyone is skimming by this point, so I should probably do my homework and get some sleep. But for anyone who made it this far, I feel like I should reward you with another photo, because a picture is worth a thousand words, and word count blogged is the ultimate measure of the worth of a man's life.

Here is a picture of me, Kern, and Hiroko, from last fall. We're at the random aqueduct near ... Nanzen-ji? Eikan-do? Anyway, it's somewhere in that area. I'm including this photo because it's an example of something I could be doing INSTEAD OF BLOGGING!



I guess the thing I learned most from the NaBloPoMo experience is that I should cherish my free time and live life for the moment, rather than spending it all sitting in front of my computer. :)

And to all the NaBloPoMo'ers out there, ...

OTSUKARE!!!!!!

Got To Keep On Movin'

Once again it happens... I bike home frantically from a cappella rehearsal, hitting "new post" just as the clock on my computer flips to 12:00, hoping, hoping... and yes, Blogger's clock is a few seconds behind mine and I make it just under the line again.

So it's official... I started the paperwork for moving today. I don't think the two little beings hanging out on my shoulders are an angel and a devil, but one of them is going "yeeeeah!" and the other one has its face down in its hands, shaking its head as if to say "what have we gotten ourselves into now?"

Moving is going to be a real pain. But it will be worth it. You've got to keep on movin', I keep telling myself, as strains of Matthew Wilder's "Break My Stride" well up from some unknown depths of my memory. I remember them singing that on "Kids Incorporated." Yes, I mean the Saturday morning kids' music show from the 80's sponsored by Jordache.

Anyway, all that aside, NaBloPoMo is nearly over. In reflection, I didn't achieve as much of my goal of catching up with things that I've done over the past year as I had hoped, but I did manage to post a few key events. After the 'Mo is over, I'm certainly going to cut down on my blog time, but as usual I hope to post once a week or so. If I start to go below once every two weeks, feel free to kick me (via email of course).

In the spirit of posting memories, here are a few more pics. And because it's starting to get damn cold here, I'm going to go with some pictures from the summer.

Let's see how many photos I can crop, tweak, and upload before I pass out from lack of sleep. :) By the way, in case you didn't know, you can click on the photo to go to its Flickr page, then click on "All Sizes" and choose a high-resolution version to download. I think most of these photos are in there at 1024x768.



First, a sailing picture. You have no idea how many awesome pictures we took on this sailing trip. It was my first time out on a boat this size, and it was a blast! Maybe I should save the stories for a blog post of their own.



Yodogawa hanabi! We had amazing seats, right under the center of it all. I'd never seen a fireworks display so spectacular or well-choreographed before!



Our wonderful seats were thanks to the connections of my soon-to-be-neighbor Peter. It was great to see him again too... it's sad how you can live so close to somebody and almost never see them.



The Ulfuls concert was awesome beyond words. Thank you so much to Yoko for the hook-up. These guys are my favorite band in Japan (sorry, Rip Slyme!) and mechamecha kandou shita! (By the way, they let you bring cameras in but ask you not to take photos during the show... so I took this photo just after the show was over. :)



To-kae, a light-up festival in Nara that has no deep meaning. Pretty, though.



This shot was also in Nara during To-kae. It's times like this when I guess I'll miss living so close to Nara. Not a lot of quiet, candlelit mountain paths in Morinomiya. :P



And this was our picnic to celebrate the end of summer. We had it in the park that sits upon the archaeological site of the ancient first capital of Japan.



Here we are moving the picnic to follow the shade. Even though this was in late September, it was still unpleasantly hot in the sun. I think it was my idea to just drag the entire picnic tarp... that turned into sort of a mini-disaster, but it got the job done. People kept telling me that it was a stupid idea, and we should just leave the tarp where it was, but something inside me kept telling me ... you've got to keep on movin'.

Confessions of a Digital Packrat

Nostalgia.



This is the week when I need to make my decision about moving in January. I'm really pretty sure I'm going to do it - I think I'll give them the final decision tomorrow. I can think of lots of reasons pro and con, but my heart has built up enough momentum in that direction that it would be pretty disappointing to back out now. I'll certainly miss this place, though... the enormous kitchen, the sunlight streaming through the sliding glass doors in the morning, the two wonderfully spacious balconies...

Standing out on my rear balcony tonight, looking up at the cold, sharp first-quarter moon between the smooth, high clouds of ice crystals, listening to the silence of the crickets and cicadas who serenaded me to sleep every evening and chanted louder than my alarm to wake me up in the summer mornings, looking out to the empty street, cold, still, devoid of cars, then stepping back into my tatami room that has been with me for the last year and a half, I am struck by wave after wave of nostalgia.



Just a few of the many memories from this apartment that come back to me, mostly parties and sickness:

Last summer, sweating profusely, curled up on my little tatami cushion thing, three bottles of Canada Dry Ginger Ale by my side, hardly able to sit up as I stayed home for three days with food poisoning, barely managing to stagger out and go see the Robocup for an hour, but mostly spending the intervening time throwing up or watching Full Metal Alchemist from my cushion on the floor.

A small Christmas party last December with Hiroko, Mitsuko, and Noda-kun, all of us sitting at my kotatsu, sharing stories and wine over a nice Italian dinner and some Christmas cake.



A weekend last winter when I suddenly came down with a terrible fever and stomach bug, and Linda came over to bring me some medicine and make me some hot lemonade... thank you, Linda! You're awesome.

The random night when Emma locked her house keys in her kendo dojo and had to crash at my place. We stayed up till 2am playing go. :)

David standing at my whiteboard, educating us about the geography of France.



The going-away party / hanami / not really sure what the excuse was party this past spring, when Masuda-san brought an entire branch of a cherry tree in full bloom.

And of course, my very first night here, dropped off around 11pm by Kanda-san, exhausted, hungry, with no food or knowledge of my surroundings, hoping that (a) all of the stuff in my luggage survived the flight unscathed, and (b) I would be able to find the bus to work in the morning...

I guess sadness is an essential part of awareness. I find that if I really open my mind and try to perceive everything without all the social guards we usually put up, I am overwhelmed by emotions of joy and sadness. I will really miss this apartment, but... is that a reason not to move? It's kind of like ending a relationship. It is ending a relationship. Inasmuch as people have relationships with inanimate things, the relationship with your home is a particularly intimate one.



But just because something is good doesn't mean it has to be perpetuated forever. This is where my "meaning of life" instincts start getting confused. For example, if you were to go to the pile of my stuff that still sits in my parents' basement, you would find a lot of things that aren't essential at all. Old binders from elementary school, t-shirts from high school, an old fish tank I had many years ago... a lot of that stuff is junk, and has no practical value. Its only value is to be a vessel for memories. How can I possibly part with my "Cobleskill College Math Team - We strive to be number -eⁱπ" shirt? (Yes, that's what it says, rather than the correct -e^iπ) And yet... when would I ever wear it again? What would I do with it?



A few years ago I came up with the idea of taking digital photos of things like that and then throwing away the originals. That way the memories would still be retrievable. I haven't done it so much yet, though. Which is probably good considering my personal history with hard drives.




But where does the value in life lie? Is it in our memories? Memories fade. They can only be kept alive with the taking of photos and the retelling of stories. Even so, "living in the past" is something most people consider negative.


Ok, is it just me, or do we all look SUPER young in this picture?

On the other hand, "living for the present" can also be taken to excess. How would you rate the quality of life of somebody who, say, spent every waking hour drugged out and happy, staring blankly (yet contentedly) at the TV as the days pass unnoticed? Something tells me that is "bad".

Yet someone who moves from town to town, job to job, building no lasting relationships, is living in the present and staying active.. and yet still it seems to me that something is missing. Memories, history, and deep relationships are important.



I think Philo mentioned something today about how taking photographs is unnatural. Looking at the images artificially reinforces insignificant memories in our minds, and thus alters our structure of memory, which, I would add, fundamentally changes who we are, since memories are a significant part of our identity.

It's a difficult balance, trying to preserve memories that are important to us, and yet trying to avoid being a packrat and keeping boxes and boxes stuffed with baubles and trinkets with no significant meaning to us. Do we really need to commemorate every single week of our lives?



I wonder if our generation is seeing the birth of a new breed of "digital packrat", an obsessive personality type hoarding gigabytes and gigabytes of personal history, from blogs and digital photos, to archives of old emails, office documents, chat histories, ... and descending into the realm of neurosis, how about even keeping web history files, system error logs, old bookmarks files, and obsolete software? I have a few old Infocom games from the mid-80's for the Apple IIGS in my parents' basement... it's hard to part with games like that when I poured so many hours of my life into them.

I guess it's a subconscious pursuit of immortality. By keeping an exact record of everything we ever did, we can preserve our lives forever. The only problem is that documenting this information and sorting through this information takes time. Blogging itself has taken up approximately three full days of my time over this past month. That's time when I could have been living life instead of documenting it. But what is the worth of a life not shared?



As for sorting through and weeding out the valuable from the worthless, I often brush off this responsibility, saving it for this imaginary time "when I'm 75 years old and bored, sitting in a rocking chair and staring out my picture window all day", but I wonder whether that day will ever come.

Just like that old bag of gummi Ninja Turtles candies from Spain from 1990 and that nasty old box of Ghostbusters Cereal with the hologram on it from who knows when, I guess it's time to part with this apartment. It's sad to say goodbye, but sometimes you know that it's time to move on.



I'll miss the balconies, though.

Yet Another Love Test

Haha, I haven't done one of these in a while. :)

This is a test that determines your love personality type. I took it once and got a pretty disturbing result (something about being woman's worst nightmare!?) but I went through again and thought through the answers more carefully and came up with this result, which is fairly accurate in my estimation.

I'm sort of cringing in advance at the comments certain people might post in response to this, but hopefully it's all constructive. ;)

"Huh?" The Billy Goat Deliberate Brutal Sex Dreamer (DBSDm) Horny. Stubborn. Kinda cute. Slightly immature. And often found on rough terrain. You are The Billy Goat. You're lusty, but typically monogamous, and all in all you're a pretty good boyfriend. In fact, you enjoy relationships, if mostly for the sex and physical companionship. You'd do or say almost anything to get together with someone, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. You're sensitive, you have a certain boyish charm, and you're eager. Therefore you probably attract girls who are serious about romance. But few who get close to you realize how unready for total commitment you are. People fall for you. Meanwhile, you maintain your emotional distance, and there goes another box of tissues. Your exact opposite: The Loverboy Random Gentle Love Master You're perfectly capable of a long-haul relationship, but, right now, dating someone primarily means having a consistent, available, preferably not-too-chatty, hookup. You're a careful, methodical person, and you work hard at making things work. It's just that the type of woman most likely to find your strengths endearing is also the most likely type to find your shortcomings heartbreaking. Someone with a similarly laid-back approach to dating would be perfect for you. ALWAYS AVOID: The Priss, The Sonnet, The Wild Rose CONSIDER: The Playstation Link: The 32-Type Dating Test by OkCupid - Free Online Dating.

So... any "Playstations" out there? :P

A Quiet Day at Home

So, all my friends went to Universal Studios Japan (USJ) today. They invited me to go, and it was a tough decision... on the one hand, it's an exciting cool theme park with state-of-the-art technology and thrilling rides, and a group of eight of my good friends was going. On the other hand, I've been burning my candles at both ends for an awfully long time, and I've been feeling a real need for some downtime. Plus I have never had any interest whatsoever in USJ.

I ended up not going, and I stayed home doing exciting things like: buying one of those blue tablet things for my toilet, scrubbing underneath and behind my bath, doing laundry, washing dishes, and organizing my files. I also managed to reduce my "starred emails" pile by 15 messages (from 243 to 227), and I put a dent in the enormous pile of ancient frozen foods taking up my freezer, some of them left by people who moved away so long ago that nobody here today even knows who they were...

I also finally got around to some tasks that were on my "to-do" list for a long time. One of them was preparing my karin-shu, which is a liqueur made of an odd fruit called "Chinese quince" in my dictionary. I'm not sure it's edible. Anyway, that's soaking now and should be ready in six months.


Karin-shu

I'm making some mikan-shu as well, which is a liqueur made of mandarin oranges. I made some ume-shu (often translated as "plum wine") over the summer, which came out very well, and in the past I've experimented with making prune-shu and strawberry-shu, which were both pretty harsh, although the prune-shu was much more drinkable. The strawberry-shu tasted like paint thinner with a slight hint of strawberry.


Mikan-shu

All of these things are basically the same idea - take some fruit, some sugar or honey, and a whole bunch of "white liquor", which is low-grade shochu (distilled sake). You put it in a sealed glass container and let it sit for several months, by which time the shochu, originally as strong and harsh as cheap vodka, becomes a nice, fruity liqueur. The fruits, on the other hand, absorb a huge amount of the alcohol, as will become immediately obvious to you when you bite into the plum sitting at the bottom of your ume-shu. :)

The karin is an extremely strong fruit, and it's very hard to cut, even with a sharp knife. As I was wrestling with the fourth one, I accidentally slipped and gashed one of my fingers on my right hand. I finished the karin-shu preparation one-handed, with my bleeding finger high in the air, and then I bandaged it up. It's not too bad of a cut, fortunately, but I have started noticing things that I do with my right hand. The two that I noticed today were (1) peeling fruit, and (2) opening bottles and milk cartons. Why do I use my right hand for these tasks? I have no idea.

Anyway, I'm going to finish packing up my summer clothes and camping gear and going through some piles before I call it a night. I didn't get to go on the Spiderman or Jurassic Park rides today, but I think I came closer to achieving some peace of mind.

The Blanket of Time

Wow, that was a lot of pictures yesterday. Now it's time for some prose - 1541 words today.

Lunch in Namba

Today I met up with an old Japanese friend of mine who is visiting from Hong Kong. We went to an Italian restaurant in Namba, and the food was good. Several things about the restaurant seemed odd to me, though. Not odd like, "only in Japan", but odd in that they went against my basic internal values and aesthetics.

First, the decor of the place was cold. Very cold and impersonal, like the lobby of a company that makes enterprise middleware or something else equally bland. In my experience, Italian restaurants tend to be dimmer, with more organic-looking decor. Rough-hewn wood with farming implements or Renaissance paintings on the walls with tarnished frames. Maybe some stucco. Not aluminum and plexiglas.

Next, the price was a bit ridiculous. It wasn't really so prohibitive, but I've certainly had food of the same quality for much lower prices elsewhere. I guess the thing that got me was that, on top of the inflated prices, they insisted on charging us for the water at the table. Come on, we're already paying for pizza and pasta... what's up with that?

I can certainly understand charging extra for the value of the real estate, but unless you're going to provide a nice atmosphere, why put up the pretense that this is some sort of unique experience? I went there to be with my friend, and I was paying the cost of the meal for that opportunity. I would have been far more happy to have had the water charge included with the price of the menu set than to be told, "here, you have to pay extra because you're so lucky we are giving you mandatory fancy water." Drop the pretense, please. If you're going to go for pretense, make the place look like an Italian farmhouse or something rather than a fancy corporate bathroom.

On the positive side, the glasses and silverware were excellent. Nice reverberant ring to the water glasses, and the silverware appeared to actually be silver. That was a nice touch that made it feel like a "fancy restaurant".

Water Glasses of Antiquity

At one point I caught myself glancing over at the cabinet where they kept all the fancy water glasses, and I had a cognitive glitch. One of those moments where you get a flash of a whole bunch of ideas at once that aren't really related to what is going on.

It was about a topic I have often been stewing on for the past few years - the differences between life now and life in the past. By the past I don't mean the 1970's, or the 1920's, or the 1880's, but long, long ago... Think pre-Roman, pre-Greek, back to the fertile crescent, the Nile, the Ganges.

I often consider what today's society has in common with these ancient civilizations. The differences are obvious, of course, and I feel like they often give us a false sense of intellectual superiority over people in those days. But what of the similarities?

Let's look back at this restaurant. A fancy restaurant on the top floor of a new shopping center in the largest shopping district in Osaka. What did they have going for them?

- Good food. I'm sure they had excellent food in ancient times. People tend to find a way to put together delicious dishes given whatever kinds of food they have at hand. Except for the English, apparently.

- Fancy silverware. The technology for silversmithing certainly existed in those times. In fact, given that there was no mass-production, I would suspect that a great deal more pride went into fashioning beautiful silverware.

- Fancy glassware. Glass-blowing is also an ancient art.

- A solid customer base. I'm not sure about this. I assume that far fewer people had the free time and ready cash to eat out regularly in the olden days, but I don't really know. When in history or prehistory did the concept of the restaurant first arise? Does anyone know? As far as I can tell, this is the only thing that is likely to have changed significantly with the progress of technology.

Reflections on the Past

Anyway, this mental glitch triggered an avalanche of thought. What other things do we have in common with the past, or in what ways are we superior?

It seems like the main forces that motivate people are sex, money, love, and fear. I guess there are more to the list, like hunger, cold, and the need to pee. Anyway, this is all off the top of my head. If you want a more comprehensive listing that can be backed up by actual evidence or research, ask a humanities person. I develop cold, unfeeling automatons for a living.

These forces have not changed significantly since the dawn of civilization, as far as I know, and thus I suspect the behaviors of people have not changed so much either. Love triangles, broken contracts, oppressive governments, betrayal, lies, trust, deceit, inspiration, introspection, gambling, sales, storytelling, and envy were probably just as relevant to life of an ancient peasant on the banks of the Nile as they are to high school kids in North Carolina today.

Why do we think we're so superior? The things I most enjoy in life today - spending quality time with good friends, maybe with some quality food and drink and some quality conversation - are not direct results of technology. Yes, I have more time to do things like this thanks to the generally raised standard of living we have developed, but very little of it has anything to do with computers or space exploration. Even if you're a tribe of nomads out on the steppe, you can achieve the same goal around a campfire after a hard day of herding whatever it is that lives out on the steppe.

What if we're not so superior, then? Still staring at the wine glasses, my mind made a huge, wet, mental sucking sound as I zoomed out temporally to view all of history in one instant... so many of the things we think are so important become infinitesimally small and inconsequential when you do that.

The Blanket of Time

The lives of mere mortals become little, repetitive stories, all the same elements playing over and over again like patterns in a woven blanket. Problems or decisions that seem enormous on a personal scale to each of those billions of little people, are reduced to little repeats of the same refrains - if only we could all share one great pool of memory, we wouldn't be doomed to repeat these little histories over and over again. Great dynasties and kingdoms become reduced to single threads in the massive blanket of time.

This gave me a deep feeling of insignificance.

What does insignificance mean, though? I'm obviously important to my friends and family, and they to me. But our lives will probably have little or no impact on history, like the other anonymous masses whose lives lie untallied in the depths of time.

Perspective

Maybe it means to relax and chill out... that all the drama of life isn't really so significant. On the other hand, maybe that's a dangerous way to think - to chill out about everything is to live one's life without passion. I think passion is one of the things that defines us as individuals and carries the meaning in life.

I guess it's mostly just about seeing things in perspective. Realizing how much of the blanket your life touches, and being sure your decisions and emotions aren't disproportionate. For example, when you think about the reality of politics throughout history, you realize how meaningless it is to get angry about what you read in the news. It's fine to be informed, and even to take action to try to change things, but there's no point in being angry and decreasing the quality of your own life.

Likewise, it is important to see relationships in perspective. Breakups, for example, are hard, but realizing that billions and billions of people have gone through the same emotions you're going through is comforting in some small way. It takes things out of the "end of the world" status category and puts them into the "things that suck but people deal with and move on" category.

In a way it's nice to feel un-special. Although it's disappointing, it's also a bit comforting to know that I'm seldom breaking new ground with my ideas or experiences. Others have been there before me, and others will come after. My actions don't mean anything in the Grand Scheme of Things. I need only worry about their effects on myself, the people and institutions I love, and the reality of the world around me.

Epilogue

I do apologize for the length again... I would have tried to organize and filter a bit more if I hadn't written this late on a Saturday night. I do actually prefer writing coherent essays over rambling aimlessly. :P The ideas I wrote about tonight are very important to me, though, and it is a bit frustrating when I can't exactly put into words why this is. Perhaps I don't fully understand myself. Anyway, hit me back with any thoughts you have regarding similarities between life today and life in the past!

Fushimi Inari Taisha

Here's the first part of yesterday's adventures. I went to Fushimi Inari Taisha, a large shrine complex in southern Kyoto which I've been wanting to go to for several years now.

This has been an exhausting week, and I'm not going to write much - I'll let the pictures tell the story with some minimal narration. Spent more time on the pics than I would spend writing anyway. :P


Here we are at the entrance to the shrine complex.


Inari shrines have something to do with foxes. I have long known this in a vague sense, and my Japanese friends weren't able to shed any more light on it, so I'll just leave it at that for now. There were lots of fox statues here, and they even had fox-shaped charms for sale. I do know that foxes, like tanuki, are reputed to have magical powers, and I think in Japanese mythology they have been known to shapeshift and deceive people.


Fushimi Inari Taisha is a really big, commercially successful shrine. These wooden plaques have people's wishes written on them. That's standard at any shrine or temple, but here there were an incredible number of them. In addition to ordinary people, many business owners come here as well, giving huge amounts of money to the shrine in exchange for blessings and good luck.


At last we arrived at the entrance to the path Fushimi Inari is famous for. This walking path winds around and up the mountain, allegedly covered by 1000 torii gates. None of us felt like counting, though...


Towards dusk, it can get kind of dark and spooky.


Halfway up the mountain, there was a nice lookout point where we could behold the wonderful ugliness of Japan from above.


The top of the mountain was covered with vast stone fields of torii leading to more torii, with hundreds and hundreds of little wooden torii scattered around for some reason. Again, our Japanese guides could do little to shed light on what the meaning of all these little gates could be.

Ok, I really need to go to sleep now... But here's one last picture - sometimes when I'm photoshopping, I get sidetracked... :)