The sakura are truely finished now, and summer is starting here in Japan. Last night I heard the first of the noisy cicada buzzing in the evening. This year was probably the most perfect weather I’ve seen so far, the whole week the cherry blossoms were blooming it was beautiful sunny weather.

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 to a car park.

Just as I was passing a week ago, I saw this big tree come down and be pulled away by the digger. Things move fast, and probably in a month or do, this will be a finished car park.

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 photos within that rectangle. You can fetch by most recent or other options. I haven’t found a way to fetch the details of a particular photo from it’s ID, so I resorted to saving the IDs in a local database. This means that I can have each of the thumbnails link to a Panoramio page, showing the nearest 5 stations to that photo. It also means that the number of pages available on my site has jumped by around 30,000. Google has been gorging itself on the new pages recently, so there may be a slowdown.

Here’s a few examples of panoramio pages:

Shibuya

Near Tabata Station

Near Nishigahara Station

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 heading out on my bike, I saw it parked in it’s usual place. As I started towards it, the bus pulled away and went down a small street I didn’t know. I started chasing it, through more and more unfamiliar roads, always catching glimpses of it turning in the distance. Finally, I caught up to where the driver was picking up another bunch of kids, from another kindergarten. It seems the same bus is used by several different schools.

Along with this train-shaped bus, there’s another one which arrives at the school at the same time. The second bus is shaped like a rocket ship, with a big USA along the side, boosters on the back and fins. Next time I see that one, I’ll rush down and take a picture.

EDIT: I saw the bus again today, this time by chance, on the way to the station. I managed to snap a couple of pictures with my iPhone.

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 men who win big at the races celebrate at the hotel.

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, you have to be careful geocoding. If you give google the entire address, along with building name and other extras, it can’t convert it to a lat-long pair. You have to give it just to the Chome number or Banchi number. To deal with this, I wrote an extra part in the script, where if Google gave me an error code back, I’d try the same address again, cut at the last space. Thankfully, Starbucks wrote their addresses with spaces included, so it often worked.

The app itself was written in CakePHP and uses Google Maps to output the points. The data is a year old now, so there’s probably some inconsistencies there.

Starbucks in Japan Map

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 hill with loads of cherry trees. The view of the Showakan makes it perfect, it feels like you’ve been transported back to the Seventies

You can cross the bridge and go under a tunnel of sakura to the Budokan, then continue through the park. Or you can cross the road and go to Yasukuni Jinja, where they always have food stalls set up. If you continue walking up Yasukuni-dori (the big road) you eventually get to Ichigaya, from where you can double back along the river and walk all the way to Ochanomizu station.

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. Each year is a different colour, and you see lots of houses with a large collection. The symbol inside the circle is the kanji for dog, inu (犬). The year is written, Japanese style, at the bottom of the dog kanji. This house hasn’t updated the sticker yet – the latest year is Heisei 20 or 2008.

Last weekend there was crazy wind and rain all over Tokyo. After visiting a friend, we had to take a long detour through the Tokyo underground to get back. In one of the stations (maybe Kayabacho) they’d rigged up a drip to stop the water falling from the ceiling onto the platform and causing accidents. It looks just like something you’d see in a hospital to keep a patient alive. It looks pretty new too, like they make a fresh one every time the rain gets heavy. I didn’t have time to see where the water went from the tube.