I went back today to the slope of terraced rice paddies that Nils and I visited last week (where the kids played among the paddies) to see it from some different angles. It's been three months since rice was planted, and now some of the hundreds of fields have been harvested, and a few were in progress while I visited..

The pictures on this post are of one elderly couple working on a field.

Don't let the picture above fool you: these people worked, and worked hard. In the scene below, the man drove the small combine and the lady [...]

The Japanese beer market is both interesting and frustrating.

Prior to twenty years ago the few major breweries all produced a few rich beers that were all more or less the same type of beer available since after the war. After WWII the Japanese people suffered greatly, food-wise, so rich lager beer emerged as a way a man could indulge himself, and thus "Japanese Beer" was set in stone for the better part of two generations.

That all changed in 1987 when Asahi Brewery's "Super Dry" was released on the market. If I remember the story I read not long [...]

Continuing from yesterday's post about playing in rice paddies, we crossed the streets to see the ones we came there for. They're tiers cut into a hillside on either side of a small stream coming from the mountains. Because they're above us and extend so far away (well over a dozen tiers extending almost a mile up the hill), only the first few closest really look like anything. The rest are too small.

If it hadn't been so excruciatingly hot, I might have had the sense to drive up the hill on the little access road that parallels the stream, [...]

I went for a drive into the mountains the other day, with Anthony, Nils Ferry, and Nils' son Greg. It was the first time I'd seen Nils since he was my tour guide around Kyoto's Miyagawa-cho area earlier in the summer, about the same time that Anthony last saw three-year-old Greg (when they checked out some big mushrooms together).

Our goal was a photo hunt of some terraced rice paddies that I'd seen the previous day, but the kids having fallen asleep during the drive, we first had to wake them up...

(Nils has an almost identical photo on his [...]

I posted yesterday about an amazing evening rainbow I saw at dusk but neglected to get a picture of. It turns out that there was a similar rainbow 10 minutes earlier, 10km away, that a friend was able to get a picture of while driving.

See his rainbow pictures here.

Having taken the main rainbow photo while driving, it's not the best example of photography ever made, but at least he got a shot, which is infinitely more than I was able to do.

For a while now, I've been meaning to recommend Zak Braverman's blog as one with good [...]
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