The other day I posted a tree/island silhouette that I took on our recent jaunt to Okinawa. The shot was taken in the rain under a gloomy overcast, near dusk. Because I was exposing for the silhouette, I could get by with a relatively undemanding exposure that I could have achieved even with my old D200...

I took the shot from a beach near the road, and while returning to the parking lot in the increasing rain, I noticed an Okinawan grave tucked away deep in a clump of trees, nestled in the darkness at the side of a hill....

An important component of Japanese culture is "presentation", but it can quickly takes a backseat when inconvenient, such as how much of Japan's natural beauty has been disfigured by utility poles, wires, and street signs. (Examples on my blog over the years include: this - this - this - this - this - this.)

So, it's especially nice when presentation is not only remembered, but really done well. The shot above was the after-meal coffee and cake that came with the $10 lunch we had at an out-of-the-way cafe during our trip to Okinawa last weekend.

For $10, we got [...]

Sadly, TiVo and its ultra-intuitive user interface is not available in Japan, but there are plenty of similar devices, called "DVR" here (Digital Video Recorder). We have a Sony BDZ-X90 unit that we bought a year or so ago. Its list of features and functions is huge, exceeded only by its ridiculously high pricetag.

Anyway, it worked just fine until five days after the warranty expired, when suddenly only the display worked (and only to show "System Error"). A call to Sony confirmed that it would have to be sent in for service, so I dropped it off at a [...]
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Okay, so yesterday's post about Japan's Cherry-Blossom Season Off to an Early Start was somewhat misleading. I normally write about things in Kyoto where I live, but Fumie and I took a short trip (just two nights) to Okinawa, a string of Japanese islands in the East China Sea, well beyond Amami (which we've visited twice, and I've blogged about many times), about half way between the Japanese mainland and Taiwan.

We returned yesterday, and I posted some cherry-blossoms that we discovered while exploring Okinawa. To be fair, though, I have to note that the locals told us they expected [...]

Japan's cherry-blossom season has arrived a bit early this year. During a drive in the mountains yesterday, we came across some cherry blossoms that were just starting to bloom.

There weren't many blooms yet, but already lots of buds....

I normally don't post new cherry-blossom pictures until mid-to-late March (last year's "It Has Begun: Cherry Blossoms in Kyoto" went up on March 25th), although new plum blossoms do come a month earlier, with 2007's first plum-blossom post arriving in mid February, and last year's "Plum Blossoms at the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine" just catching the tail end of the plum-blossom on [...]