The roads of southern Japan's Amami Islands used to be lined with walls built from dead coral, but now only a few such remnants of the past remain. During our trip to Amami, we visited the most western village on Kakeroma-jima (the island outlined in purple on this map) and found some of the old walls. Some were quite tall, perhaps two meters.

The five sticks seen leaning against the walls in the image above are an example of what one often saw while driving around Kakeroma-jima: long sticks placed at frequent intervals along the road. It turns out that [...]

Yesterday's events were more than just throwing beans.

Continued here...

The Heian Shrine (a huge shrine in eastern Kyoto) had Setsubun events today (Wikipedia on "Setsubun"). The main event associated with Setsubun is mamemaki – 豆撒き, literally "bean scattering" – which involves throwing dried beans at demons while yelling "demons out! Good fortune in!"

As you might expect of any event that involves the throwing of beans, kids love it.

Kids love it unless they think the demons are real...

The demons eventually headed up toward the main building of the shrine, where unbeknownst to them, beans awaited.

The parent in me was surprised at how few children attended the [...]

As I wrote before, it was often windy and rainy during our New-Year's trip to Amami, in southern Japan, but the weather was quite dynamic and squall might be immediately followed by brilliant sunshine.

Within 10 minutes of each of these photos being taken, it was raining.

I found myself suddenly lusting for a second monitor (Lightroom 2 supports two monitors), and with visions of a tax writeoff dancing in my head, I opted for the mid-level Eizo FlexScan SX2461W, a 24" widescreen that offers a 1,920 × 1,200 desktop in luscious relatively-wide-gamut color.

(If I'd had visions of hitting the lottery dancing in my head, I'd have gone for the $6,000 Eizo ColorEdge CG221)

I had trouble setting up my XP box for dual monitors until I installed the latest drivers for my ATI graphics card -- ATI's new "Catalyst Control Center" made it trivial to [...]