I’d really have no problem staying in a capsule hotel if I were visiting Japan, in-fact a stay of at least one night should be on any visitors to-do, or bucket list. After all, you only go around once.
Of course the capsule experience is a little different from conventional hotels, in more ways than one… needless to say such confined rooms do not have their own bathroom, so you’ll be sharing communal facilities with other guests, and this means it will be necessary to observe a certain etiquette:
Many capsule hotels put a lot of effort into their bathing facilities, giving guests a sentou or communal bathing experience. So, yes, you’ll be bathing with strangers. Capsule hotels are segregated by gender, so if you are a man, you’ll be bathing with men. Likewise, females bathe with females. A note on bathing in Japan: Wash your body and hair before you get in the bath. There will be a washing area with faucets. Also, if you have tattoos, you will either need to cover them with bandages or not take a bath. Tattoos are typically prohibited due to their organized crime connotations in Japan.
Unless you live in Japan, you may not have encountered a removal service as attentive as that offered by Japanese home moving companies. I expect you’d pay a premium for such treatment, but it would surely reduce – considerably – the stress and hassles associated with moving.
While there are seemingly endless popular culture references to Ninjas, covert Japanese secret-agent like operatives, they are in-fact very few in number today, and most likely will eventually disappear all together:
Both Kawakami and Hatsumi are united on one point. Neither will appoint anyone to take over as the next ninja grandmaster. “In the age of civil wars or during the Edo period, ninjas’ abilities to spy and kill, or mix medicine may have been useful,” Kawakami says. “But we now have guns, the internet and much better medicines, so the art of ninjutsu has no place in the modern age.” As a result, he has decided not to take a protege. He simply teaches ninja history part-time at Mie University.
We woke on Saturday morning to the news of the horrific school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Despite the shocking and senseless scale of this tragedy, I fear we are not going to stop being told that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”.
The argument goes that if people couldn’t use guns to kill, they’d find another way. While that may be so, there is clear evidence (this via an article I saw on Kottke) that full gun control drastically reduces fatalities, something that has been observed in Japan, where gun ownership laws are perhaps the strictest in the world:
What is the role of guns in Japan, the developed world’s least firearm-filled nation and perhaps its strictest controller? In 2008, the U.S. had over 12 thousand firearm-related homicides. All of Japan experienced only 11, fewer than were killed at the Aurora shooting alone. And that was a big year: 2006 saw an astounding two, and when that number jumped to 22 in 2007, it became a national scandal. By comparison, also in 2008, 587 Americans were killed just by guns that had discharged accidentally. Almost no one in Japan owns a gun. Most kinds are illegal, with onerous restrictions on buying and maintaining the few that are allowed. Even the country’s infamous, mafia-like Yakuza tend to forgo guns; the few exceptions tend to become big national news stories.
Perhaps the first thing travellers to Japan need to understand, Japanese street address convention… certainly a little different from what we’re used to in this part of the world.
See: in (most of) Japan, streets don’t have names! Blocks have numbers! Streets are just the empty space in-between blocks. Duh! And the buildings on the block are numbered in order of age. The first building built there is #1. The second is #2, even if it’s on the opposite side.
The story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who was holed up on an island in the Philippines until 1974, as he believed Japan was still at war is not new, but it is still an amazing one nonetheless.
Despite being told numerous times that hostilities had ceased almost 30 years earlier, Onoda refused to stand down from his mission, and it was only after his former commander was brought to the island that he finally accepted that the war was over.
Only now did the Japanese government get involved in trying to bring Onoda’s war to an end. They managed to locate his previous commanding officer, Major Taniguchi, who was thankfully still alive. The major was flown to Lubang Island in order to tell Onoda in person to lay down his weapons. He was finally successful on 9 March, 1974. “Japan,” he said to Onoda, “had lost the war and all combat activity was to cease immediately.”
Korehira Watanabe is just one of thirty people who still works as a maker of traditional Japanese swords. Watanabe specialises in recreating swords from the Heian and Kamakura periods, which spanned from 794 AD to 1333 AD, even though there is no documented procedure, or formula, for creating swords from this time.
Although Watanabe has not been able to completely replicate swords of the era as a result, the challenge of trying to do so is something that continues to motivate him.
A selection of photos taken between June and November of the area surrounding the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station in Japan, which was damaged as a result of the earthquake and tsunami that struck last March.
