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Posts tagged Tokyo

Sakura Sakura

I’m realizing, with the blossoming of the cherry trees in Ashland, Oregon this year, just how many different varieties of cherry trees there are and how the ones in Oregon aren’t much like the ones in Japan (pictured above). For starters, most in Japan have white blossoms. Most in the USA, or in my part of Oregon anyway, are pink. Even the ones in the USA that have been around for decades look like they could have been planted just a few years ago, while those in Japan all seem larger and more ancient.

How are the cherry blossoms where you are?

Spider Monkeys (クモザル) in Tokyo

These spider monkeys can be found in the Edogawa-Ku Nature Zoo (江戸川区自然動物園) in Gyosen Park (行船公園) in Tokyo. I’m sharing them with you today simply because they were my random desktop background. They are kind of cool looking though.

Meguro Waste Incineration Plant

The building in the center may look like a nuclear power plant to the untrained eye, or to someone at Fox News, but it is actually one of Tokyo’s many incinerators. I was able to tour a different one, and the experience has forever changed my world view of garbage.

There aren’t any nuclear power plants in Tokyo. And in case the radiation hysteria has entered your mind as well, know that as of this writing Tokyo still has lower radiation levels than most big cities in the world.

And now for something completely different…

Time to turn off CNN or whatever news show you’ve been watching for the past five or six days. Time to realize that the news is performed by actors looking for ratings, not reporters looking to give you a true picture of reality. Sure there was a massive quake and tsunami. There is lots of damage, death, and destruction along the coast near Sendai and in Fukushima. Japan will recover, rebuild, and be better than before.

The news media are not presenting things accurately. I cringe at nearly everything they say. The western news media in particular seem to be totally clueless. They sometimes don’t know where they are (naming places that certainly aren’t currently located at as their current location), can’t even pronounce Tokyo (it isn’t To-ki-o), and sensationalize the facts. It’s almost as if they want things to be worse. I watched one news guy call the area hit by the tsunami a “retirement community” since there are so many old people. Rural Japan is loaded with old people. That’s Japan! Elderly people didn’t move there in retirement (which is what an American might think).

We have friends and family who have been watching the news calling and emailing us saying how fortunate we are to be back in the USA and not in Tokyo where we wouldn’t be able to find food to eat, water to drink, and where we’d be dying of exposure to radiation. Ha! I’d take the food selection in Tokyo, post-earthquake, any day.

Here are a couple more links to show how things really are in Tokyo:
Food crisis in Tokyo!!! (not)
Post Earthquake Tokyo

BTW, today’s photo is from Tokeiji in Kamakura. It represents a call for more calmness and less panic-spreading nonsense from CNN and the other news outlets.

Non-professional photos of the Japan quake (mostly Tokyo)

Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan: Readers’ Photos from the New York Times. The quality of these isn’t always great, but it gives you some idea of what Tokyo was like on March 11, 2011.

Scai the Bathhouse

The national pastime in Japan is not baseball or sumo; it is bathing. These days, most people have a really nice ofuro (お風呂) room in their apartment for such activities. Back in the day, few people could afford such a luxury so they went to the sento (銭湯 or public bath or bath-house) on a regular basis. Sadly, most of these are now gone.

You can still spot the remaining sento from a distance, though, because of the smoke stack (visible in the above picture). Notice that no steam is coming out of this one. That’s because it is no longer used as a sento. Instead, Scai the Bathhouse, the name written in English on the wall in the above photo, has been converted into an art gallery. You can find it in the Yanaka part of Tokyo.

The wires hanging above the streets in Japan drove me crazy for a while. Then I got used to them and hardly took notice. Returning to the USA caused me to notice the lack of wires. It’s strange how the mind works–focusing on differences rather than the “normal.”