A Weekend Escape
Last Saturday was Culture Day in Japan when schools all over Japan organize festivals. Since it was a rare day for me to take a day off, T’s parents took us to Karuizawa, a small resort town north of Tokyo. If you ask most Japanese about Karuizawa, the first thing they say is that many rich people have second homes there. Yoko Ono’s family, for example, had a home there, and she and John Lennon spent many summers in the village. Continue reading
Most of the pictures from my Paris flickr set are pictures from the Louvre. One of my favorite finds there was this marble statue. The marble was delicately carved to allow the cape to be translucent. I also love the little flower details that are in the hair and on the cape.It’s true that it would take days to see everything in the Louvre. But I found that one afternoon was enough to see the most famous sites, and then view the areas that most interested you. For instance, I focused on the antiquities and then the East Asian stuff. Although, since Korea was one of the few places in the world that France didn’t loot from, the Korean exhibit was quite small and unspectacular, and the same could be said of the Japanese exhibit. Continue reading
This is part 3 of a series of poems about bodies of water. Each poem is written in the form of a popular poetic style native to that body of water. In Water Poetry 1, I wrote a haiku about the Tama River in Japan and how it resembled the stream of people in a busy train station. In Water Poetry 2, I wrote a sonnet about London’s Thames River, putting the river’s long history into perspective against the London bombings and corporate greed. Water Poetry 4 riffs on the San Francisco Bay. Water Poetry 5 is a sijo about the Han River.
This post is about Paris’s Seine River, written in a villanelle.
Although it’s known as a French poetic form, there are probably more villanelles written in English. Continue reading
I’ve been having fun putting up some of my photographs on my flickr site. And as I put more and more photos there I’ll link to the new set and say a few words about it.
The picture here was taken in Fukushima, an agricultural prefecture north of Tokyo. While visiting T’s grandparents we checked out the sites and one of the most unusual was a kind of Buddhist amusement park. There were no rides or anything like that, but there was a very very large Kannon, also known as Kuan Yin in China, and various other names throughout Asia. She’s the goddess of compassion.
And in this Buddhaland, there were large ponds in which swarmed masses of hungry carp, or koi in Japanese. We’re so accustomed to seeing carp as placid colorful fish. But here they were like pirahnas, practically leaping out of the water in anticipation for food. They followed me as I walked along the pond, and got very excited if I waved my hands over them. It was freaky and mesmerizing.
Anyway, go ahead and click on the picture to look at the whole set.
