Ikebukuro is a major shopping and entertainment district in Tokyo, not too far from Shinjuku. Unfortunately, I don’t go there too often, but for the next couple months I will have more chances, because of my job. I often transfer at Ikebukuro on my way to Tokyo Dome. So I’m looking forward to taking lots of pictures. Here are a few I took while I was walking around, killing time.
As always, clicking on a picture will take you to the original on my flickr page. Enjoy!
Welcome to the new face of The Wayfarer Blog!
I will make some minor adjustments here and there, but I am pretty happy with it. What do you think? Leave a comment, or send me an email.
Now, I want to get off the computer. I’ve spent a lot of time on this, and I need a break!
I’m working on fixing some issues with way this site is laid out. Right now, I have “broken” it, and it is already 12:30am, so I need to go to bed. Please pardon the mess. I should have everything nice and spiffy within the next day or so.
Japundit has an interesting post about how the Japanese are not satisfied with only one word for rice. There are many ways to say rice in Japanese, including several not mentioned in the article.
I remember once at my high school, the teacher was translating something involving “rice” from English to Japanese, and he translated it as gohan, (ご飯), which is cooked rice that you eat, instead of kome, (米), which is uncooked rice. Since I have to pretend that I don’t know Japanese, even though the students know I do, I had to wait until after the lesson to correct him. The students didn’t get the correct information, but his delicate “face” was preserved. 
(Just another case of how blindly following a set of arbitrary rules is rather idiotic and counterproductive at times, but I digress…)
Wow! Snow…? I woke up this morning to a surprise snow storm. Or maybe it was just a surpise to me…To be fair, I hadn’t heard the weather forecast, so maybe everyone else knew about it. But I doubt it, because I think I would have heard about it from someone.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera with me this morning, when the snow was fresh on the streets. I took a few pictures later in the afternoon on the way to the store, but by that time, the streets were mostly cleared–except for a slushy mess that could be pretty slick by tomorrow morning. (Luckily, I’m off in the morning!) 
I’ve been passing it for a long time, but I’d never gone in. It isn’t that I didn’t want to; just that I never seemed to find the time. But yesterday I finally had coffee in a quant little coffee shop in Mitaka.
There are no shortage of coffee shops in Tokyo; we have more than our fair share of all the Seattle greats: Starbucks, Tully’s, and Seattle’s Best. We also have a lot of great Japanese ones, like Doutor and Excelsior Cafe. But this is a small one, and the atmosphere is completely different from a chain. The customers and the staff seemed to know each other. I felt like I was entering a community of people who seemed to know each other. It was nice.
As I mentioned before, I will be working at Tokyo Dome, on Wednesdays, for the next couple months. Here a few pictures I took before my class yesterday. It is a huge area, full of photo opportunities. I’m looking forward to taking a lot of pictures there! Here are just a few to get the ball rolling…
Interesting. Every day, Wikipedia has a featured article on its homepage. Today’s article is on the Japanese martial art, Aikido. As I have written before, I used to study Yoshinkan Aikido, but I haven’t trained for quite a while.
Shinjuku. It has its own beauty.
Update: It’s late, so I just planned on posting this picture and going to bed. But looking at this picture, I just remembered that the very first blog post I ever wrote, on blogger.com, I used a picture almost like this one. That was back in May of 2005, I believe, and we had just had a pretty strong earthquake. I was in Yodobashi Camera, a huge electronics store that you can’t see in this picture. It’s in that area, to the right, a couple blocks behind those buildings. Unfortunately, I lost that early blog post (as I explained in my first post), but I will never forget the experience. It was a Saturday, and the trains were really messed up because of the earthquake. I had finished teaching, but it took me hours to get home. I remember riding the Chuo Line, which skips some stations, and seeing tons of people just sitting down on the station platform, waiting for the local train to come. One of my friends was trying to get to a friend’s wedding. I can only imagine what a fiasco that must have been. When the earthquake hit, the clerks at Yodobashi guided frightened customers to the exits. But I remember thinking there was no way I was going to go outside. I would rather be hit by a camera bag or a package of batteries than by a falling billboard! 
I recently updated the website, which broke the sitemap page. If you have checked it recently, you might have noticed it was blank! I just fixed it, so you can once again easily access any page on this site. To access the sitemap, click here or on the “Sitemap” link at the top of every page.
