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I’m skipping a day and writing about yesterday. Day before yesterday was less interesting than yesterday, so I may or may not get ’round to writing about it.
Yesterday we visited the city of Kurashiki, guided by Sid. Kurashiki is a city of about 350,000 people with a small section of well-preserved old architecture. Kurashiki was [...]

I forgot that Tracie took a photo of this beverage for me:

Yup, I can’t resist Japan’s most famous oddly named beverage. I also spotted this ad on the front of a vending machine:

I’m sure I could come up with a number of off-color comments involving an attractive young woman and a sweaty pocari, but I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.
That aside, I don’t [...]

Yesterday we took a shinkansen (bullet train) to the town of Himeji. Himeji is the home of the Himeji castle, a magnificent feudal-era castle. It’s the castle you often see in photos of Japan, and it appeared in both Kurasawa’s film Ran and the James Bond film You Only Live Twice. We had it in [...]

As a follow-up to my previous post, here are some photos that Tracie took in a restroom in the hotel. Here’s the control panel of the main appliance:

Of note here is the button for FLUSHING SOUND, with associated volume controls. You can press this button to make the toilet generate noises to mask the noises [...]

I’m sure that everyone who read my entry on Japanese powered toilet seats in last year’s blog has been thinking “okay, all of these photos of gorgeous gardens and majestic temples are nice and all, but when is he going to tell us about the toilets?” We have arrived at that moment in this year’s [...]

On our first full day in Kyoto we hired our guide and friend Seiki Makino, who goes by Sid when associating with English-speakers. Sid an older gentleman, retired from a career with Panasonic. We enjoyed his company and expertise last year and were looking forward to seeing him again this year.
The first place we visited, [...]

Jumping back to a previous day: On our first day in Kamakura, we didn’t have any particular plans so Tracie suggested hiring one of the numerous rickshaw drivers to show us around the town a bit. This turned out to be a surprisingly pleasant venture, in part because of the gorgeous temple we visited but [...]

Here are the photos that should have been in my entry about the first day in Tokyo that we spent with Rafael and Richard. Here’s the Tokyo International Forum building:

That’s Tracie and Rafael. Here’s Richard:

This is where we sat for lunch near the beach:

No, I have no idea what dogs have to do with coffee. [...]

Sad but true: there’s no more cucumber Pepsi to be had. Richard asked a friend in Tokyo about it and forwarded the sad news on to me:

“He said that every summer Pepsi makes a one-off limited edition flavor. Last year’s was cucumber. He tried it - and said it was weird. At [...]