Category: Diary
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Idleness
Day 15 – Friday, 12 April 2024 Finally, a day to do nothing. The road down from the campsite too scary, the distances to everything too far, the lure of bed and book too great. Did nothing. I gather that Anna and the boys went for a couple of walks. Good luck to them, I…
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Remoteness
Day 14 – Thursday, 11 April 2024 The price of getting Anna to agree to a whole week in Tokyo was some time somewhere remote and relaxed. Mission accomplished. She is poorly, so it is only the boys and I that set out on two missions – to grab a handful of things from a…
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Solvet sæclum in favilla
Day 12 – Tuesday, 9 April 2024 Our hotel is only two hundred metres from Peace Memorial Park, and there is, after all, only one reason that really puts this small, regional city on anyone’s itinerary, so there is no reason to do anything else first but to take those last few steps of the…
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Philosophy and Hiroshima
Day 11 – Monday, 8 April 2024 The day started with packing – after five nights our stay in Kyoto ends today. Bags stuffed into the corner, we headed into the city centre and tried to catch a bus but, at approximately noon on a Monday, two turned up with insufficient room for all of…
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The End of an Era
Day 10 – Sunday, 7 April 2024 We are not done with Pokémon. Seb has seen, on the trains, advertisements for an exhibition leveraging the popularity of the little monsters to showcase the work of leading and emerging artisans in the traditional Japanese crafts, collectively called kogei, including textiles, lacquer work, you name it. It…
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The Red Gates
Day 9 – Saturday, 6 April 2024 Fushimi Inari Taisha is very, very famous, making any alleged joke that I might insert here about it sounding like one element of a sushi platter fatuous and ignorant. It sits at the bottom of Mount Inari and the path from the temple complex to the top is…
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Offal and Engagement
Day 8 – Friday, 5 April 2024 A day of tourist highlights: the Arashiyama Bamboo Grove, the gardens of Okochi Sanso, Ryōan-ji and the golden temple of Kinkaku-ji. I’ll let the photos speak for themselves. After a nap, I set out to poke around the neighbourhood in which we’re staying, just west of Yamashina subway…
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Wedged next to Kimonos
Day 7 – Thursday, 4 April 2024 A slow start with some shopping and coffee and cake, the last from a patisserie that hands over its signature items in a little card box with a couple of ice packs in it (this on a 20 degree day) to make sure that your glazed apple absurdity…
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Shrine, Sky Building, Shinkansen and Shochu
Day 6 – Wednesday, 3 April 2024 Woke to the first real rain in Japan. While packing carried on around me, I turned on the television in a moment of idle curiosity to find, between the inevitable morning advertorials for products I couldn’t identify, let alone decide I needed, wall to wall tsunami warnings for…