AltJapan

Super Festival 57

This brief photo sequence says everything you need to know about last week's Super Festival, Tokyo's scruffiest, grooviest toy convention.

Many, many more pics at Kaiju Korner.

It's not a tumor!

The Shrine Line

This news report is entirely in Japanese but is worth watching even if you don't speak the language. It explains a fascinating concept: that the position of Shinto shrines along the Tohoku coastline encodes information about tsunami safety zones.

The vast majority of these shrines escaped the inundation virtually unscathed, in some cases while the towns around them washed away. In the image above, the light blue area represents land that was dry prior to the quake; that is how far inland the tsunami waters washed. Note how the shrines sit almost exactly along the line where the floodwaters finally broke.

What might at first seem like a miracle of divine intervention is even more interesting in reality. Several of the shrines actually venerate tsunami (Shinto being a religion of nature-worship), and in fact represent a historical record of where many previous tsunami floodwaters broke. 

It is not for nothing that Shinto shrines are generally built on high ground. One resident interviewed in the piece relates how local lore, handed down from parent to child, said to take refuge at the local shrine in the event of a tsunami. It proved true during the disaster, saving many lives.

Like the "tsunami stones" and folktales found throughout the region, these shrines represent an attempt from those who lived long ago to communicate the dangers of tsunami to future generations. It seems likely that's precisely why they were built in these specific locations.

Being "holy ground" that typically remains undisturbed even in modern times, you could say the shrines are an encoding system. They convey information about safe areas without relying on the frailties of human memory or documents. You can seem a similar idea in modern-day attempts to devise a "10,000 year marking system" to ensure that nuclear waste sites remain uninhabited even long after the civilizations that created them have fallen.

What other sorts of traditional sites might encode useful information? It's an open question, as is their actual utility. For all the effort the people of the past put into warning us, we still decided to build nuclear power facilities on land known to be prone to devastating tsunami.

Creature Feature

Calling all monster hunters: I penned this Freaky Field Guide to Tokyo's Top 10 Mythical Beasts, which features lavish color illustrations by the talented Chip Boles.

Rather than yokai, it focuses on legendary animals -- the sorts of things you're likely to see adorning shrines and temples, or described in the pages of ancient scholarly texts. Ever wonder what that cavalcade of creatures sculpted around the roof of your local Buddhist temple is all about? Now's your chance to find out.

From favorites like the Beckoning Cat and the Kirin to more obscure specimens like Gama Sennin's three-legged toad, it's a complete guide for creature watching in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area. (For reals! There are even instructions for where to find them.)

He Shall Return?

I opened this morning's copy of the Nikkei Shimbun (Japan's equivalent of the Wall Street Journal) to come face to face with this ad. It says: "We'll Build a Great Country, No Matter How Many Times it Takes." Which is a great sentiment in the face of the recent disaster, save for one thing: the savior isn't Japanese. It's none other than Gen. Douglas MacArthur, stepping off his aircraft to begin the occupation of Japan.

Is Takarajimasha, the magazine publisher who footed the bill for this ad, saying that this is what Japan needs? That the sovereign nation of Japan can't fix itself without being occupied by another, more powerful nation? Or is it a cynical jab at the uselessness of Japanese politicians, who are too busy arguing in their sandbox to help the Tohoku victims, let alone make the country stronger? 

Pop-cultural critic Machiyama Tomohiro had this to say about the ad, which is trending on Twitter: "I don't think they put much thought into it. They're a company of idiots."

People are talking about it, so it's serving its purpose. But forgive me for wondering if the small fortune spent on designing and running these ads in six major papers might have been used to better effect elsewhere?

Hiroko and the Volcano

Hiroko's report on our ascent of Kyushu's largest active volcano is up at CNNGo.com!