Almost everywhere you go in Japan, you can see sunken areas surrounded by fences which were at some stage used as tiny resevoirs. Most of the time now they’re just empty. There are a couple of these in the Danchi where I live, but the powers that be have decided to convert one of them [...]
This is how they move a bunch of small children around in Japan, put them in a cart and push it. It’s a good idea, faster than letting them walk and much safer on the roads.
I’ve been using Panoramio photos a lot in my Japan Trains pages, where each station will display the nearest pictures pulled from Panoramio. The Panoramio API is a little bit difficult to deal with, since it only offers one way to access photos: by describing a rectangle of latitude and longitude coordinates, and fetching the [...]
I saw this great Thomas the Tank Engine school bus a few days after I moved into my place. From the window you can see a school, and every day this bus would arrive and drop off the kids. I always wanted to take a photo, but never got the opportunity. Today, as I was [...]
I pass by this sign for a love hotel every night walking to the train sation from work. The actual hotel is a big monstrosity by a dirty river but I really like the neon sign that points to it. The area where it is is close to a big racetrack, I assume the old [...]
Here’s a project I worked on, then forgot about. I used a screen scraper written in PHP to grab all the Starbucks locations in Japan to make a map. I wrote a batch geocoder to run the address results through Google Maps geocoder and recorded the latitude and longitude of each one. With Japanese addresses, [...]
One of my favourite places to go to see the cherry blossoms in Tokyo is Kudanshita. The station is always packed and it takes an age to get up the stairs, but once you emerge it’s full on sakura. There’s a beautiful moat around what was once part of the Emperors palace, and a grassy [...]
If you own a dog in Japan, you have to register it and make sure it has a name tag. It’s very rare to see stray dogs walking around and I’ve only ever seen a dog catcher once. When you register your dog, you get a sticker for that year to put on your entrance. [...]
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