October 28, 2023
Live cams from Japan
Granted, most live cams are about as exciting as watching paint dry. Except when Sakurajima erupts, which it does now and then. And Kabukicho is a town that never sleeps. Kabukicho Crossing should look familiar to anyone who's seen the opening credits to Midnight Diner on Netflix or Viki.
As with the news feeds, once you've watched one or two channels, YouTube will suggest more of the same.
As with the news feeds, once you've watched one or two channels, YouTube will suggest more of the same.
Sapporo (Hokkaido)
New Niigata Station (Niigata)
Asakusa Kannon Temple (Tokyo)
Kabukicho 1 (Tokyo)
Kabukicho 2 (Tokyo)
Kabukicho Crossing (Tokyo)
Rainbow Bridge (Tokyo Bay)
Shibuya Crossing (Tokyo)
Shinjuku Crosswalk (Tokyo)
Tokyo Tower (Tokyo)
Osaka Loop Line (Osaka)
Hiroshima Station (Hiroshima)
Sakurajima (Kagoshima)
Labels: geography, japan, japanese culture, streaming, television
October 25, 2023
Tokyo South
In this largely autobiographical account of the author's two-year proselyting mission to Japan during the late 1970s, a Mormon missionary is confronted by an overzealous religious bureaucracy and faces his own growing doubts as the work of preaching the gospel gets turned into a cynical and self-serving game of numbers and spiritual one-upmanship.
The first chapter of Tokyo South, "Lost in the Works," was the first real story I produced in my writing career. I'd signed up for a computer programming class at BYU and discovered that I enjoyed using the Pascal editor as a crude word processor (this was back during the Apple II era) more than the programming.
Then "Number Games" won second place in the 1984 Vera Hinckley Mayhew Awards, my first solid bit of external validation. (I seriously wonder whether such a story would be so well-received today; I like to call the first half of the 1980s BYU's "glasnost" era.)
Over the last two decades, a series of reorganizations and consolidations and force reductions finally resulted in the consolidation of the Tokyo North and South missions in 2007. This Ted Lyon interview makes it clear that the shenanigans I describe in Tokyo South were by no means unique to Japan.
If anything, time and nostalgia and the detached sense of sang-froid that comes with age and experience led me to pull my punches a bit.
Family names follow Western convention, the surname given last. Long vowels have been shortened to a single character with no diacritics.
The first chapter of Tokyo South, "Lost in the Works," was the first real story I produced in my writing career. I'd signed up for a computer programming class at BYU and discovered that I enjoyed using the Pascal editor as a crude word processor (this was back during the Apple II era) more than the programming.
Then "Number Games" won second place in the 1984 Vera Hinckley Mayhew Awards, my first solid bit of external validation. (I seriously wonder whether such a story would be so well-received today; I like to call the first half of the 1980s BYU's "glasnost" era.)
Over the last two decades, a series of reorganizations and consolidations and force reductions finally resulted in the consolidation of the Tokyo North and South missions in 2007. This Ted Lyon interview makes it clear that the shenanigans I describe in Tokyo South were by no means unique to Japan.
If anything, time and nostalgia and the detached sense of sang-froid that comes with age and experience led me to pull my punches a bit.
Paperback
Kindle
Smashwords
Apple
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Kobo
Read an excerpt
Family names follow Western convention, the surname given last. Long vowels have been shortened to a single character with no diacritics.
Related posts
The evolution
Tokyo South is alive
Tokyo South is dead
The weirdest two years
The problem with projections
Labels: books, BYU, ebooks, japan, japanese culture, kindle, peaks island press, publishing, religion, tokyo south
October 21, 2023
Weather News
Aside from serious events that demand a more sober tone (like earthquakes), the presenters maintain a relentlessly upbeat attitude. Being easy on the eyes certainly helps as well (see the program guide).
The male co-anchors show up to talk shop and occasionally host a time slot but they are obviously not the main draws.
Hosted coverage begins at 5:00 AM JST and continues until 11:00 PM JST in six three-hour blocks: Morning, Sunshine, Coffee Time, Afternoon, Evening, and Moon. They will cover notable events like the recent annular eclipse and the Orionid meteor shower live.
Labels: geography, japanese culture, japanese tv, science, streaming, technology, television, weather
October 18, 2023
Angel Falling Softly
Rachel Forsythe's once perfect life is now anything but. The younger of her two daughters is dying of cancer, and neither God nor medical science can promise her a cure.
Milada Daranyi, chief investment officer at Daranyi Enterprises International, has come to Utah to acquire a medical technology company. Bored with her downtown hotel accommodations, she rents a house in the Salt Lake City suburbs.
Then the welcome wagon shows up. To the neighbors, Milada is a beautiful and intelligent young woman. But Rachel suspects something more about her, and makes an unexpected and dangerous discovery: Milada is a vampire. Fallen.
And the only person in the world who can save her daughter's life.
Maralise at Blog Segulla calls Angel Falling Softly
With some qualifications, Doug Gibson of the Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner declares it
According to Angela Hallstrom, author of Bound on Earth,
And Stephen Carter, editor of Sunstone Magazine, says it's "one of the best Mormon novels ever written,"
Milada Daranyi, chief investment officer at Daranyi Enterprises International, has come to Utah to acquire a medical technology company. Bored with her downtown hotel accommodations, she rents a house in the Salt Lake City suburbs.
Then the welcome wagon shows up. To the neighbors, Milada is a beautiful and intelligent young woman. But Rachel suspects something more about her, and makes an unexpected and dangerous discovery: Milada is a vampire. Fallen.
And the only person in the world who can save her daughter's life.
Paperback
Kindle
Smashwords
Apple
Nook
Kobo
Read an excerpt
Maralise at Blog Segulla calls Angel Falling Softly
a good read. I would even venture to say that it's a great read. I was captivated by the tight and nuanced writing in Woodbury's most recent release from Zarahemla Books.
With some qualifications, Doug Gibson of the Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner declares it
better than 99 percent of Mormon fiction out there. It takes our beliefs out of comfort zones, inviting analysis and debate. No matter what happens, we've learned something.
According to Angela Hallstrom, author of Bound on Earth,
Angel Falling Softly is more than a good read. It is a provocative meditation on life and death that will leave readers both satisfied and unnerved. It kept me reading, and it kept me guessing.
And Stephen Carter, editor of Sunstone Magazine, says it's "one of the best Mormon novels ever written,"
proof positive that Mormon fiction is not dead. And even if it was, Woodbury has called it from its grave, bestowed it with immortality, and given it a mighty fine set of literary fangs.
Labels: angel falling softly, ebooks, fantasy, kindle, peaks island press, publishing, religion
October 14, 2023
The Showa drama
The Showa drama is a staple of narrative fiction in Japan, especially movies and television. According to the still active practice of giving the era of each emperor a unique name (or nengou), the Showa period is named for the reign of Emperor Hirohito (1926–1989).
The era name of his son Akihito is Heisei, so Showa 64 and Heisei 1 both refer to 1989. Confusing? You bet! Historical references prior to the Meiji period often include the Gregorian year in parentheses because it's confusing to Japanese too.
A Showa drama can begin in the late Meiji (ending in 1912) or Taisho (ending in 1926), as long as it continues into the Showa. The story typically gets rolling during or immediately after the Occupation (1945–1952).
Political events such as the February 26 Incident are noted in passing (if at all) and the war is depicted from the point of view of a middle-class housewife—coping with draconian rationing while watching the young conscripts go off to war and come home in boxes.
And in series like Hanako and Anne and Massan (the former because Hanako was an English translator, the latter because Ellie was a British national), fending off the loathed Kenpeitai, the Gestapo-like police force.
The Great Tokyo Earthquake in 1923, the firebombing of Tokyo in March of 1945 and the broadcast of Hirohito's Surrender Rescript a few months later, the Tokyo Olympics and debut of the Shinkansen in 1964, all frame the Showa drama as metaphorical turning points.
The genre has eclipsed even the popularity of Edo period (1603–1868) samurai dramas. With every milestone (almost eight decades have passed since the war's end), it is increasingly steeped in nostalgia. Of the ten Asadora serials broadcast on NHK between 2010 and 2015, seven were Showa dramas.
Including Hanako and Anne and Massan. Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises is in many respects a very conventional Showa drama.
The more upbeat Happy Days version of the Showa drama is prefaced by the Occupation and ends in 1964 with the Shinkansen and the Tokyo Olympics. Ume-chan Sensei belong in this latter category, as does Goro Miyazaki's From up on Poppy Hill.
There probably isn't a more sepia-steeped example of the latter than Always: Sunset on Third Street. Literally, in this case, as you can tell from the title.
Always tells the story of a working-class neighborhood in Tokyo, focusing on Ryunosuke Chagawa, a struggling novelist, and Norifumi Suzuki, an auto mechanic who can't resist buying the latest gadget—a refrigerator and B&W television in the first film, a color TV by the third.
The trilogy ends in 1964 with the Tokyo Olympics and a pair of newlyweds leaving for their honeymoon on the brand-new Shinkansen.
Yasujiro Ozu's slice-of-life family dramas from the 1950s and early 1960s make for an interesting comparison. The only nostalgia on display in Ozu's postwar films is for those few remaining remnants of a world destroyed by the war and now fading away.
Ozu spends little time looking backwards and instead focuses his attention on the world around him. Not knowing what was going to happen hence, Japan in the 1950s was a less than reassuring time. For all anybody knew, it was going to be the Taisho period all over again.
In 1953, Donald Keene visited Kyoto as a graduate student, at one point attending an economics conference sponsored by the Institute for Pacific Affairs. He observed that the Japanese attendees were uniformly "convinced that Japan's future was dismal."
None of them could imagine that the three decades of double-digit economic growth right around the corner would turn Japan into an industrial powerhouse.
This evolving realization can be read into Yasujiro Ozu's films. The sober realism of Tokyo Story (1953), Early Spring, (1956) and Tokyo Twilight (1957) brightens markedly with Good Morning (1959), The End of Summer (1961), and then Late Autumn (1963).
His later films are suffused with a bemused wonder at the new world blossoming around him. Ozu delights in framing old, worn, wooden architecture in facades of glistening glass and steel; characters leave one scene in traditional kimono and enter the next in suits and skirts.
People move from old businesses to modern office buildings, from old houses to concrete apartment blocks. The glowing technicolor turns them into photo spreads out of National Geographic, preserving a point in time as it really was rather than how it is now remembered.
Still, Showa nostalgia is more than a trick of memory. Japan went on a thirty year winning streak, temporarily tripped up only by the oil shocks of the early 1970s. It became the second largest economy in the world and not a few "big thinkers" predicted it would soon pass the U.S.
Little wonder that Japan's most popular anime series today remains the long-running Sazae-san, a family-friendly Showa dramedy that take place roughly between the late 1960s and the early 1980s.
Come the 1990s and the bubble burst. For the next two decades, everything that could go wrong did: a stock market crash, two devastating earthquakes, a nuclear meltdown, birth rates below replacement and a declining population that shows no sign of leveling out anytime soon.
Except when that declining workforce is factored into the equation (GDP-per-worker), the Japanese economy is doing rather well. Now it's only the third biggest in the world. Per-capita GDP in 2014 is over three times that in 1964. Japan leads the world in life expectancy.
A few years ago at TEDx Kyoto, Jesper Koll enthusiastically made the forward-looking argument.
Which isn't to say that the good old days weren't, just that they weren't quite as good as we like to remember, and the present day isn't quite as bad as we like to pretend. This too shall pass and Japan will still be here, doing better than most.
The era name of his son Akihito is Heisei, so Showa 64 and Heisei 1 both refer to 1989. Confusing? You bet! Historical references prior to the Meiji period often include the Gregorian year in parentheses because it's confusing to Japanese too.
 |
| In Carnation, Itoko has to work hard to save her precious sewing machine from getting recycled. |
Political events such as the February 26 Incident are noted in passing (if at all) and the war is depicted from the point of view of a middle-class housewife—coping with draconian rationing while watching the young conscripts go off to war and come home in boxes.
And in series like Hanako and Anne and Massan (the former because Hanako was an English translator, the latter because Ellie was a British national), fending off the loathed Kenpeitai, the Gestapo-like police force.
The Great Tokyo Earthquake in 1923, the firebombing of Tokyo in March of 1945 and the broadcast of Hirohito's Surrender Rescript a few months later, the Tokyo Olympics and debut of the Shinkansen in 1964, all frame the Showa drama as metaphorical turning points.
The genre has eclipsed even the popularity of Edo period (1603–1868) samurai dramas. With every milestone (almost eight decades have passed since the war's end), it is increasingly steeped in nostalgia. Of the ten Asadora serials broadcast on NHK between 2010 and 2015, seven were Showa dramas.
Including Hanako and Anne and Massan. Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises is in many respects a very conventional Showa drama.The more upbeat Happy Days version of the Showa drama is prefaced by the Occupation and ends in 1964 with the Shinkansen and the Tokyo Olympics. Ume-chan Sensei belong in this latter category, as does Goro Miyazaki's From up on Poppy Hill.
There probably isn't a more sepia-steeped example of the latter than Always: Sunset on Third Street. Literally, in this case, as you can tell from the title.
Always tells the story of a working-class neighborhood in Tokyo, focusing on Ryunosuke Chagawa, a struggling novelist, and Norifumi Suzuki, an auto mechanic who can't resist buying the latest gadget—a refrigerator and B&W television in the first film, a color TV by the third.
Yasujiro Ozu's slice-of-life family dramas from the 1950s and early 1960s make for an interesting comparison. The only nostalgia on display in Ozu's postwar films is for those few remaining remnants of a world destroyed by the war and now fading away.
Ozu spends little time looking backwards and instead focuses his attention on the world around him. Not knowing what was going to happen hence, Japan in the 1950s was a less than reassuring time. For all anybody knew, it was going to be the Taisho period all over again.
In 1953, Donald Keene visited Kyoto as a graduate student, at one point attending an economics conference sponsored by the Institute for Pacific Affairs. He observed that the Japanese attendees were uniformly "convinced that Japan's future was dismal."
The general impressions of the conference, at least to an outsider like myself, were of resignation on the part of the Japanese and friendly but unhelpful attempts by non-Japanese to cheer them. I could not detect anything positive arising from the discussions.
None of them could imagine that the three decades of double-digit economic growth right around the corner would turn Japan into an industrial powerhouse.
His later films are suffused with a bemused wonder at the new world blossoming around him. Ozu delights in framing old, worn, wooden architecture in facades of glistening glass and steel; characters leave one scene in traditional kimono and enter the next in suits and skirts.
People move from old businesses to modern office buildings, from old houses to concrete apartment blocks. The glowing technicolor turns them into photo spreads out of National Geographic, preserving a point in time as it really was rather than how it is now remembered.
Still, Showa nostalgia is more than a trick of memory. Japan went on a thirty year winning streak, temporarily tripped up only by the oil shocks of the early 1970s. It became the second largest economy in the world and not a few "big thinkers" predicted it would soon pass the U.S.
Little wonder that Japan's most popular anime series today remains the long-running Sazae-san, a family-friendly Showa dramedy that take place roughly between the late 1960s and the early 1980s.
Come the 1990s and the bubble burst. For the next two decades, everything that could go wrong did: a stock market crash, two devastating earthquakes, a nuclear meltdown, birth rates below replacement and a declining population that shows no sign of leveling out anytime soon.
Except when that declining workforce is factored into the equation (GDP-per-worker), the Japanese economy is doing rather well. Now it's only the third biggest in the world. Per-capita GDP in 2014 is over three times that in 1964. Japan leads the world in life expectancy.
A few years ago at TEDx Kyoto, Jesper Koll enthusiastically made the forward-looking argument.
Which isn't to say that the good old days weren't, just that they weren't quite as good as we like to remember, and the present day isn't quite as bad as we like to pretend. This too shall pass and Japan will still be here, doing better than most.
Related posts
Massan
Hanako and Anne
The Wind Rises
Ume-chan Sensei
From up on Poppy Hill
Showa nostalgia
Labels: akihito, history, japanese culture, japanese tv, movies, nengou, nhk, showa period, television, ww2
October 11, 2023
Dunbar Woods
Glimmeridge, the mystical home of a clan of Fairlies, lies deep in Dunbar Woods, hidden behind an invisible Veil. As Watcher or guard for his clan, Tam uses his magical Watchfire to protect his family and keep tabs on the Humans who live near the woods.
One fateful night, Tam's sister, the clan Storyteller, forsakes the clan when she elopes. Their mother, the cold and powerful Queen Morna, accuses Tam of negligence and threatens to throw him into the dark and mysterious Pit. To avoid this terrifying punishment, he makes a rash bargain: he will convince a human girl to take his sister's place as Storyteller.
Tam chooses Keely Ellingsen, a high school student who loves the woods and loves writing stories. Keely considers herself an ordinary teenager burdened with chores and homework. But Tam's friendship, her dreams of success, and a family secret draw Keely to Fairlie culture and the prospect of becoming a Storyteller.
Tam's growing affection for Keely and her family obligations complicate their relationship. While she ponders the best course for her future, he struggles between his clan's strict rules and Keely's human ingenuity. Together, they confront the darkness that lurks at the edges of the Fairlie world.
One fateful night, Tam's sister, the clan Storyteller, forsakes the clan when she elopes. Their mother, the cold and powerful Queen Morna, accuses Tam of negligence and threatens to throw him into the dark and mysterious Pit. To avoid this terrifying punishment, he makes a rash bargain: he will convince a human girl to take his sister's place as Storyteller.
Tam chooses Keely Ellingsen, a high school student who loves the woods and loves writing stories. Keely considers herself an ordinary teenager burdened with chores and homework. But Tam's friendship, her dreams of success, and a family secret draw Keely to Fairlie culture and the prospect of becoming a Storyteller.
Tam's growing affection for Keely and her family obligations complicate their relationship. While she ponders the best course for her future, he struggles between his clan's strict rules and Keely's human ingenuity. Together, they confront the darkness that lurks at the edges of the Fairlie world.
Paperback
Kindle
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Apple Books
Google Play
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Read an excerpt
Labels: beth, books, dunbar woods, ebooks, fantasy, kate, peaks island press, publishing
October 07, 2023
News from Japan (in Japanese)
Japan's commercial news networks and a number of regional television stations stream their news feeds on YouTube. These news networks are akin to the old school news agencies like Reuters. Stations often subscribe to more than one, including their competitors.
Because the primary purpose of these news networks is to provide their affiliates with broadcast content, the same blocks of material are reused and repeated throughout the day and week. But a broad slate of channels makes it easy to sample a fresh set of stories.
For a couple of fun peeks behind the scenes, Stay Tuned! (Netflix) is a slice-of-life comedy about a television station in Hokkaido. Wave, Listen to Me! (Crunchyroll) is an even wackier comedy about a late-night talk show host at a small radio station in Sapporo.
This is not a definitive list. Watch one channel and the YouTube bots will suggest a bunch more. The World Clock is a good resource for keeping track of the time.
News Networks
• All Nippon News Network (ANN) has 26 affiliates and originates from TV Asahi in Tokyo.
• Fuji News Network (FNN) has 28 affiliates and originates from Fuji Television in Tokyo. FNN has a live cam of the famous Shibuya Crossing.
• Nippon News Network (NNN) has 30 affiliates and originates from Nippon Television (NTV) in Tokyo.
• TBS News Dig is part of the Japan News Network (JNN) with 28 affiliates and originates from TBS Television in Tokyo.
Regional Stations
• HTB Hokkaido News originates from Hokkaido Television Broadcasting in Sapporo. HTB produced Stay Tuned! as part of its fiftieth anniversary.
• STV News originates from Sapporo Television Broadcasting in Sapporo. STV has been the highest rated television station in Hokkaido for over a decade.
• Nagoya TV News originates from the Nagoya Broadcasting Network in Nagoya and focuses on news from Aichi, Gifu and Mie prefectures.
• MBS News originates from the Mainichi Broadcasting System (MBS) in Osaka.
• Kansai News 24 is an ANN affiliate that focuses on news from Osaka, Kyoto, Hyogo, Wakayama, Nara, Shiga, and Tokushima prefectures, known in Japan as the Kansai region.
• Sun TV News originates from Sun Television in Hyogo prefecture.
• Home Hiroshima News originates from Hiroshima Home Television in Hiroshima prefecture.
• Kagoshima News KTS originates from Kagoshima Television Broadcasting Corporation in Kagoshima prefecture, located in the southern part of Kyushu.
Of course, no news can be considered complete without the Weather News.
Because the primary purpose of these news networks is to provide their affiliates with broadcast content, the same blocks of material are reused and repeated throughout the day and week. But a broad slate of channels makes it easy to sample a fresh set of stories.
For a couple of fun peeks behind the scenes, Stay Tuned! (Netflix) is a slice-of-life comedy about a television station in Hokkaido. Wave, Listen to Me! (Crunchyroll) is an even wackier comedy about a late-night talk show host at a small radio station in Sapporo.
This is not a definitive list. Watch one channel and the YouTube bots will suggest a bunch more. The World Clock is a good resource for keeping track of the time.
• All Nippon News Network (ANN) has 26 affiliates and originates from TV Asahi in Tokyo.
• Fuji News Network (FNN) has 28 affiliates and originates from Fuji Television in Tokyo. FNN has a live cam of the famous Shibuya Crossing.
• Nippon News Network (NNN) has 30 affiliates and originates from Nippon Television (NTV) in Tokyo.
• TBS News Dig is part of the Japan News Network (JNN) with 28 affiliates and originates from TBS Television in Tokyo.
• HTB Hokkaido News originates from Hokkaido Television Broadcasting in Sapporo. HTB produced Stay Tuned! as part of its fiftieth anniversary.
• STV News originates from Sapporo Television Broadcasting in Sapporo. STV has been the highest rated television station in Hokkaido for over a decade.
• Nagoya TV News originates from the Nagoya Broadcasting Network in Nagoya and focuses on news from Aichi, Gifu and Mie prefectures.
• MBS News originates from the Mainichi Broadcasting System (MBS) in Osaka.
• Kansai News 24 is an ANN affiliate that focuses on news from Osaka, Kyoto, Hyogo, Wakayama, Nara, Shiga, and Tokushima prefectures, known in Japan as the Kansai region.
• Sun TV News originates from Sun Television in Hyogo prefecture.
• Home Hiroshima News originates from Hiroshima Home Television in Hiroshima prefecture.
• Kagoshima News KTS originates from Kagoshima Television Broadcasting Corporation in Kagoshima prefecture, located in the southern part of Kyushu.
Labels: business, dlibjapan, geography, japanese culture, japanese tv, nhk, streaming, television, weather
October 04, 2023
Apron
Making the most of her unique ability to speak to remnants of the dead, Donna Howard researches the provenance of art and antiques. This time, her investigation into a colonial-era portrait delves into the dark history of her adopted niece, SarahAnn, uncovering a kidnapping and a murderer who got away scot-free.
The journey to uncover that history takes the Howards and the Gregersons from Maine to upstate New York, from wedding venues to house museums. Facing a past she never knew, SarahAnn questions what constitutes a person's "real" heritage and whether breaking the law is justified in preventing a more heinous crime.
There are times when honestly confronting the past may leave our descendants with no choice but to choose their own ancestors.
Donna Howard Mysteries
The journey to uncover that history takes the Howards and the Gregersons from Maine to upstate New York, from wedding venues to house museums. Facing a past she never knew, SarahAnn questions what constitutes a person's "real" heritage and whether breaking the law is justified in preventing a more heinous crime.
There are times when honestly confronting the past may leave our descendants with no choice but to choose their own ancestors.
Paperback
Kindle
Smashwords
Apple Books
Google Play
Nook
Kobo
Read an excerpt
Coin
Silver Spoon
Apron
Clasp
Labels: donna howard, ebooks, fantasy, history, kate, kindle, mystery, peaks island press, publishing, social studies