In the continuing spirit of appearing to be actively blogging while not actually writing anything, I’m posting another big batch of photos – this time from Osaka and a day trip last Sunday to Kyoto. To be fair, the cherry blossoms are going nuts right now, and the effect they have on people here is, well, difficult to do justice in words alone. I have a truckload of new photos I want to stick in your face, but I’ve been waffling over the best way to do that. Do I just toss up a few examples (as below) and link to my gallery site? Use one of those cheesy slideshow tools I experimented with last fall? (You can see better slideshows at my gallery site.) Start a separate photo blog and force you to add the feed to your already bloated RSS aggregator? I’m wide open to suggestions. (I’m also wide open to friends of CSS. My manandultraman.com address is primed for launch – except that I can’t figure out how to edit the title bar so I can shoehorn in that badass Ultraman graphic up there.)

As always, click on any image and find yourself transported to my corner of Japan via the magic of the web. Go ahead: put on your bathrobe and pretend it’s a kimono. I won’t tell anyone.

KYOTO

Geisha in Gion District

Cherry Tree and Storm Clouds in Maruyama Park

Bridge and Sakura along Shijo-Dori

Lanterns at Shrine in Teramachi

Woman in Kimono

Street Corner near Kenninji Temple

Yasaka Pagoda at Dusk

Young Girls at Kenninji Temple

Cherry Blossom at Heian Jingi Shrine

OSAKA

Bar Owner in Namba, Osaka

Man Playing Samisen at Osaka-Jo Castle

Osaka-Jo Castle Walls

Baseball Practice in Ibaraki Park

Osaka-Jo Castle

There’s nothing like moving house to make you realize how much of what you own is either broken, disfigured, useless, unidentifiable, or just a complete piece of crap. Likewise, moving from one temporary residence to another in a strange foreign country can cause you to reflect on how much you’re paying to keep all that broken, stained, unidentifiable crap in a storage shed back home. Meanwhile, you find yourself collecting still more crap, because that’s the fundamental nature of human beings: after reproduction, our chief biological imperative seems to be to collect stuff. In my case, except for high-end electronics and books, that stuff tends to be junk. Given that I’m also childless so far, nature has probably written me off as a complete failure. As far as the natural world is concerned, I’m just taking up space.

The photo below provides a pretty accurate inventory of just about everything I’ve added to my pile since I arrived in Japan eight months ago. It includes winter clothes (mostly secondhand), of which I brought diddlysquat with me, a couple of easy chairs (used), a small Japanese-style couch (used), a floor lamp, a table lamp (used), a coffeemaker and a rice cooker, and some boxes containing books and maps, kitchen and cooking items, and a bunch of the miscellaneous detritus (see above) that we’re not sure we really need to drag along to a new place but can’t bring ourselves to throw away. This is the stuff that’s still sitting in a room in my apartment building in Fukui, because I haven’t yet figured out how to get it to Osaka.

Not pictured here is everything I brought with me on the train yesterday – i.e. whatever I could jam into two straining suitcases – the same two suitcases I arrived in Japan with last August. Funny how most of the stuff that went into them is almost exactly the stuff they contained when I arrived.

Chances are I’m going to be indisposed for the next couple of days, what with getting a handle on the new teaching gig, moving to Osaka, tying off the sutures in Fukui and taking copious notes on it all. So I’m going to do what any blogger worth his salt does when he’s stalling for time to knock up another post: junk up the space with filler. In my case, the styrofoam peanuts at hand are photos I took a week ago in Sabae, a rice-field-spackled outpost about 30 minutes south of Fukui. Enjoy, feel free to click through to the photo gallery site, and remember: the comments button doesn’t bite.

A few of my closest compadres out there know that about three weeks ago I interviewed for an English-teaching position at a school in Osaka. I didn’t say much about it at the time because I was still wrestling with whether I was going to stick around in Japan or head back to the states and get in on the recession. But last Friday I hopped a train bound for Osaka. On Saturday, I put on a tie for the first time in, oh, I dunno, 10 months?, signed a contract, and started shaking hands. It’s official: I’m now an Osakan.

For the moment, I’m living with my friend Will (teacher, mountain-climber, Australian, baldie), who works at the same school I do. Actually, he’s the whole reason why I’m even in Osaka, since I never would have heard of the gig if I hadn’t met him (in Nagano, remember?). I’m training this week – lots of time observing other teachers in action and learning “theory” (apparently there’s theory involved in teaching English; who knew?). It’s a part-time gig, so I’ll still have plenty of time to travel and write. Truth is, I feel like a new college grad again. (Note to mid-life crisis sufferers everywhere: forget the sports car and the affair! Simply become an expatriate English teacher!)

In a few days I’ll head back to Fukui and be a country mouse again for one last weekend while I move out of my fifth-floor digs there and figure out how to get my very small number of material possessions the 200 kilometers or so down to Osaka without an automobile. In the meantime, I’m readying myself for spring in the big city. I suppose this means I’m sticking around in Japan for a while. Who needs a sports car when you’ve got bullet trains?

My second visit to Kyoto was, I’m pleased to report, a smashing success. I held onto my wallet, I missed not a single train or bus, I did not injure or overly humiliate myself, I lost no organs to the black market, I caused no international diplomatic incidents, I neither married nor impregnated anyone, I made no grown men cry (although one embittered convenience store clerk may have cursed me), and I broke nothing that I had to pay for. In my wake lies a minimum of trauma, anguish and bereavement. I made no audible jokes at the expense of nearby old persons, I kicked no living animals, I swallowed nearly every item of food I placed in my mouth, and to the woman two tables over whose legs I ogled during the course of 20 minutes in the Gion Starbucks I have already apologized profusely.

Of coasters, matchbooks, lacquered chopsticks, saké cups, tiny vintage photographs of geisha in tranquil repose, matching salt-and-pepper shaker sets, and small pieces of Chionin Temple, I stole only the minimum required by posterity and the grievous demands of the Holiday Season. All but one bathroom break occurred indoors, the initials I carved into a 2,000-year-old cherry tree in Inari-taisha Shrine are, I believe, completely untraceable, and it’s likely that the taxi driver who nearly sent me into oblivion as I jaywalked across Shinbashi-dori believed afterward that I was only pointing at the sky in his direction. I also feel sure the Chawan-zaka gallery owner who wished me to hand over ¥100 after I took a candid photo of him will think twice before wrestling over ¥100 in a ceramic pottery shop again.

At no time did I spit upon another person’s bare skin, none of the Japanese coins I used were obvious forgeries, and if I made one too many rude jokes to that shoe store clerk in Kyoto Station about the size of my feet, c’mon, it was all in good fun, she’ll live.

The “present” I left under the Christmas Tree in Maruyama Park will surely amuse the lucky city employee who finds it, providing he’s seven years old, has a strong stomach, and is easily amused. Contrary to what a certain passenger in car 3 of the Kyoto-Osaka Keihan line thinks, a small, neat pile of toenail clippings is not cause to summon the conductor, for Christ’s sake. It’s not the Spanish Inquisition, you know. Anyway, toenails biodegrade, which is more than I can say for a certain someone’s tits. Also, here’s a memo for all employees of the Osaka Aquarium: if you think everyone who walks through the door somehow knows that flash photography will permanently blind the fish, you have another think coming. Throw a community sushi dinner and call it a fund-raiser, problem solved.

My host’s hair will grow back eventually, her landlord is unlikely to notice the missing ductwork until at least spring, and if she didn’t tell me she was afraid of heights, how could I possibly know not to rock the Ferris wheel cab while we were at the top? Finally, I don’t know what world her neighbors live in, but in the real one, if any part of a newspaper is lying in your driveway, it’s yours. Finders keepers, man.

New Bride at Heian Jengu Shrine Garden

Shakkei and Japanese Tourists at Heian Jengu Shrine Garden

Texting Woman on Teramachi-dori Corner

Yours Truly

In my ambitious goal to spend as much time on Japanese trains and buses as possible, I’m heading out this afternoon for a weekend in Kyoto, which is about 115 kilometers (do the conversion yourself) to the southeast of Fukui. There, I’m staying at my friend Inna’s house in the city. She’s promised to show me the “real” Kyoto, which I really hope does not involve a lot of karaoke.

The last time I was in Kyoto, it was mid-August, my second weekend in Japan, and it was 39º C in the city, which made breathing difficult, not to mention walking around. Given that there are an estimated 1,600 temples to see in Kyoto, almost all of them on the International Register of Outlandishly Important and Unmissable Historic Sites, I’m fairly wriggling with happiness over the fact that while I’m there this time, it’s going to be a bracing 10º, on average. (Okay, fine: 50º F. Happy?)

Also, I realized this morning that I hadn’t properly posted any links to my Arashima-dake photo gallery, and hadn’t made any mention at all of my trip on Saturday to Katsuyama’s Heisenji Shrine, picturesque rebuilt castle, or space-age dinosaur museum. So here they are. As an aside, I should note that eventually – sooner, hopefully, than later – I’ll be moving Man and Ultraman out of its current digs in Wordpress’s free blog-hosting ghetto and into a spiffy new self-hosted ranch-house in the upper-middle-class suburbs, now that I’ve ponied up for my own domain. There, I’ll have access to loads of new customizable options, which will include bell-and-whistle-dripping photo gallery plug-ins as well as curbside trash pickup, though I’ll also probably have to deal with a dictatorial neighborhood association. You take the good with the bad, I guess.

For the moment, then, a couple of photos from (and links to) my trips last weekend to Katsuyama and Arashima-dake. Unless I manage to file a report from Kyoto (say, by sneaking out of a karaoke club and into an internet café), this blogger will return with Kyoto stories aplenty – and an impressive new bus mileage total – next week.

Katsuyama Castle and Old Woman Working in Field

Sunset on Arashima-dake (No I did not wet myself, thanks very much - that’s sweat. Note also the soaked boots. That’s not sweat, that’s ice water.)