I'll be leaving for the UK tomorrow, so here is the final instalment of my Japan blog for this time. There's a lot to pack in, though, so some may have to wait until I get back ( Read more... )

I first visited Kanazawa seven years ago or more, in July 2017. I was looking forward to the city's famous seafood, and afterwards the Hida beef of Takayama, my next stop. Alas, I was suffering from heatstroke at the time and had no appetite. More, the Airbnb I'd booked was, while not bad, a bit more basic than I'd counted on. Nor could I find the ( Read more... )

After a couple of quiet days (spent looking at early translations of Tom Brown's Schooldays, since you ask), today I went to Kyoto to meet my old PhD supervisor and his wife, who happened to be visiting as well. They lived for a year or two in the city (and before that in Kobe) during the 1990s, rather after I'd finished my PhD and more immediately ( Read more... )

A week has passed since I last posted here. If I've remained silent that long it's not because nothing has happened, but because many things have, which tessellated so efficiently as to leave few crevices of time in which to write them up ( Read more... )

This has been a rather train-orientated couple of days. On Saturday I made my way to the other side of the city and the Katano branch of the Keihan line, where (following a tip from my colleague at the Prefectural Library) I had heard that there was a Thomas the Tank Engine promotion ongoing - connected tangentially, I believe, with the forthcoming ( Read more... )

Well, I'm back in Japan. Not for a holiday, this time, but for research. I will having a few side adventures, especially at weekends, but for the most part I'm commuting from an AirBnB somewhere in Higashiosaka to the Prefectural Library, where I'm working with their superlative children's book collection ( Read more... )

A few weeks ago I began to give a potted version of my trip to Japan last March-April, with my daughter and her boyfriend. I didn't get very far, because Flickr (where I keep my pictures for importing to LJ) was playing up - and still is, as far as my main computer is concerned. However, I'm now on a laptop, so I'm going to put just a few ( Read more... )

This is a question that has long bothered me, but not enough to research the answer ( Read more... )

Back when your granny was a wee lass, there was a small railway station at Ashley Hill in Bristol, just where Ashley Down meets Purdown, and in the shadow of the Muller orphanages. It looked like this:


( Read more... )

I had a couple of days in London at the end of the week. First, to attend a book launch by my friend and colleague Chris Hood at the Daiwa Foundation. The book was the thoroughly reworked and updated second edition of his introduction to Japan for Routledge's "The Basics" series. It was a good event, and I bought the book, of course ( Read more... )