A week ago a friend hosted a private shakuhachi concert by another friend, Zak Braverman. A shakuhachi is a bamboo flute that superficially looks a bit like a recorder, but its sound is very distinctively Japanese. Zak's main skill is in producing a pasta sauce to die for, but this day's event tapped into his minor talent of being one of the best shakuhachi players in the world.

Zak has appeared on my blog many times (such as here playing shakuhachi in an eclectic ensemble), but more often it's his kids Gen and Tamaki that appear.

After playing one piece [...]

I like some kinds of spicy food, such as things with wasabi (a powerful horseradish-esque garnish) and kimchi (Korean spicy pickled veggies), but when incorporated into snacks in Japan, such as kakipi, these spicy tastes get toned way down, to a bland, pedestrian level.

So this evening at the convenience store I saw a corn-chip snack with packaging that lent the feeling of "spicy" (as you can see at right), I didn't pay much attention to what was written on it and threw it into my shopping basket.

I should have paid attention.

The name of the product is boukun [...]

I've got another cold (what is it this spring?) so am a little extra slow on everything... have been sleeping for the last couple of days. Ugh. Not fun. This one seems to be short, though... starting to feel better already.

I ended my previous post, Clearing Roof Snow in Shirakawago, at a cafe in Shirakawago Village. Just outside the cafe they have a little spot that makes for nice photos (and perhaps for nice business for the cafe), and the proprietress was kind enough to take a snapshot for us...

Looking in the other direction from that spot, one [...]

Picking up where the previous post, "First Look at Snowy Shirakawago Village" left off, we had re-forged a trail through thick snow back to relative civilization....

While we were looking at the menu, the proprietress went outside to clean the snow off the part of the roof that threatened the entrance to the cafe (using a rope tied to the roof ridge, as described in yesterday's post). Anthony was interesed in anything involving large clumps of snow, so he went out to watch.

The big stick proved to be too big for Anthony, which was just as well because he [...]

In my most recent post about our short four-day New Year excursion a few hours' north of Kyoto by car, I ended with our having left Gokayama village (五箇山) after lunch, heading a bit further south to Shirakawago Village (白川郷).

The two villages are both world-heritage sites, famed for their quaint and interesting gasshou zukuri style of construction (built without nails or screws). Shirakawago is by far the more famous, and it suffers for it: it's a tourist attraction that happens to have some quaint buildings. Gokayama, on the other hand, felt like a small village that we just happened [...]