Today saw a total solar eclipse visible across a thin sliver of earth, starting in India, cutting across China, then clipping a few southern islands of Japan.

Before I talk about the eclipse, allow me to rant about one of the most asinine aspects of Japanese culture, one of those "it's just the way it is" things that distresses and inconveniences everyone, but still never changes...

The tiny World-Heritage jungle island Yakushima, 50 miles off the southern coast of the Japanese Mainland, lies just within the northern end of totality, while the larger Amami Oshima 150 miles further south (half [...]

#7 in a series on our visit to KidZania in Nishinomiya, Japan. Anthony's day so far: gas-station attendant, banking, construction, driver's ed, and journalism. Next it was time for a bit of flight training.

Kidzania's flight-training area also had a plane mockup for flight-attendant training, as well as for kids to take part as customers, giving the flight attendants people to train with...

Anthony was interested in pilot training. That area of the "school" had six mock cockpits, so 12 kids could "train" at once...

When it was time for a new group, the kids got flight jackets and the [...]

The last day of Anthony's school before breaking for the summer -- the Japanese school year starts in April, so summer break is during the middle of a grade -- included a sleepover for all the first graders, right at the school. I went to pick him up at the appointed time on Sunday, but he ended up playing with some friends for a while.

First we piled the kids into some cars and headed over to a nearby river play spot, one that Anthony played at last year. This year, though, he wasn't really in the mood to play [...]

In my post the other day about flowers lining a lane on Taketomi Island (a tiny, culturally-unique island far south of Japan), I asked about the color of the flowers. No one got it right until I gave a hint, that being a botanist might help. Then a botanist got it right.

Here are some close-ups...

Hopefully, regex.info's resident botanist will offer some, er, color commentary on these little friends in the comment section of the post.

That's not the only botanical surprise we found in the coral walls. We often found plants growing from them, apparently like a weed, [...]

I don't think I'll require nine separate posts to cover the third day of our recent trip to Japan's Ishigaki Island in the East China Sea, but we'll see.

I'll start out Day Three with a little quiz....

A few miles off the south-west coast of Ishigaki Island is the tiny Taketomi Island, known for its quaint culturally-unique village. Most lanes in the village are lined by three things: coral walls, pretty flowers, and ugly utility poles.

Construction is under way to bury all the wires and get rid of the poles, so I've taken the liberty of doing so [...]