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trains

Tales that deal primarily with trains

Nikko is Nippon

Posted on June 8, 2008 by Brian

Nikko, in case you don’t know, has roughly three claims to fame: a Buddhist, a shogun, and three monkeys. OK, here you go, the quick and dirty history lesson: At some point in the mid-eighth century some dude named Shodo Shonin established a Buddhist training center just up the mountain from the town of Nikko.
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Chamerberlain plays witness to a fictionalized account of Tokugawa’s rise to power and his ultimate uniting of Japan, thus ushering in the Tokogawa Shogunate and the Edo period, which would last for roughly 200 years.
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One of the panels is the pictorial representation of the Buddhist maxim of “Hear no evil, Speak no evil, See no evil.” This is believed to be the earliest pictorial representation of this maxim using monkeys. Continue reading

Categories: Asakusa, Food, Nikko, Ryokan, slide show, Tales, trains, Travel, UNESCO World Heritage Sites | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Fly me to the moon…in a paper airplane?

Posted on June 6, 2008 by Brian

The grand art of origami continues. The girls not only fold well known shapes, but teach each other their most recently learned or discovered sequence. There is a deligence and devotion akin to the effort put into learning new kanji. Teachers frequently encourage their students to “be the brush” when they practice their kanji. This supposedly takes their writing to calligraphy level heights with Edo-style skill – doing things with no wasted motion. The same principle applies to origmai, where “being the paper” seems to magically ease the folds. Continue reading

Categories: origami, Shogako, Tales, trains | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

The morning train

Posted on June 5, 2008 by Brian

There are only two things worse than taking a train during rush hour. The first is taking a train during rush hour in the summer. You are innocently standing on the platform, waiting patiently. The train pulls up. The doors open. This releases a toxic cloud of B.O. strong enough to make the weak and unsuspecting faint. And that is before you get in the train. The second, and far less severe, is taking a rush hour train on a rainy morning. The rain dampens an already dire mood. The humidity from the humans and moisture on them fogs the windows and you expect rain to start falling from the ceiling at any moment. Continue reading

Categories: Tales, trains | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment