Deep Purple on the shamisen
Shamelessly stolen from Japan Probe, but it's too mind-blowing not to spread the word about it.
Sand storm
Last Saturday in the early afternoon, we had a huge dust storm all over the 関東 area. It started out as a very nice day, sunny 15°C, I went for grocery shopping in just a light sweater. Then around 2PM, the sky suddenly became dark, great gusts of wind started whistling around the corners of our building, we could see the road signs and city lights shaking in the street and parked bicycles being blown away. The sky became dark yellowish / light brown as the huge dust cloud passed over us. Then it was over in 15 minutes.
I couldn't take a good photo as my girlfriend wouldn't let me open the windows or open the door to go outside (we just cleaned up the apartment, so letting all this dust come in was definitely not a good idea), so I got this photo of the event from surround's photostream on Flickr.
Apparently, these dust storms happen often in the Kanto plain at the turn of spring. This huge plain all around Tokyo is heavily farmed and parched fields, from the very dry winters we have here, go up in dust with the strong winds marking the coming of spring.
Omotesando Sunday
Walked around 表参道 yesterday visiting interior design shops, looking for cool lamps.
Nice shops to check out:
- The brand new MoMA store in the Gyre building (from which I took the photo) with lots of funny gadgets.
- hhstyle just down the road from there with very very nice and very very expensive furniture.
JLPT Results craze
The results for the 日本語能力試験, more commonly known as JLPT 2008, should be getting in everyone's mailbox in the imminently and it shows:
Visits to my blog post of receiving the results last year have been spiking in the past week.
Good news: a colleague of mine got it in the mail this morning before coming to work, so most people in Japan should have it tonight or tomorrow.
Bad news: the people at the JLPT organization are mail nazis (not delivering the papers if your name is not on your mailbox, imposing crazy processes to let them know you changed address) and since I moved just before taking the test there is a pretty good chance that I will never receive the damn results.
Kick the demons out
Today, February 3rd, is the day of Setsubun in Japan. As we live in a new place, my girlfriends mother told her we had to start on the right foot and follow the good old traditions to bring us luck.
On this day, which marks the turning point between winter and spring, you have to kick the 鬼 or demons out your house and bring the 福 or good fortune in. This is done by having someone dress up as an 鬼 and throwing 福豆 at them while chanting 「鬼は外！福は内！」 which is a whole bunch of fun.
Then you put a 厄よけ out your door to ward off any evil spirits that would like to come back in. It's some sort of mistletoe-like bouquet on which you stick fish heads, the smell of which is supposed to scare demons.
