Two weeks in Tokyo gives you a lot of stories but even more photos. Sometimes they are bad, sometimes they come out better then you even have the skill to take, all the time it can annoy the friends you are with, haha. Stopping every few steps, taking multiple shots, forcing them to be in the frame for multiple takes & worst of all having them stand still when the temple your in has so much stagnet water that mosquitoes the size of jawbreakers eat them alive.

This isn’t the end of the series, but wanting to have a post of the most visually interesting shots of Tokyo here is the top photos out of the 1,450+ photos that were taken. I am not exaggerating that number either. The Finalist is at the bottom and please correct me in the comments if you feel I am wrong.

Warning this is image/bandwidth heavy

Quarter Finalists

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While I was in Tokyo for two weeks in the middle of July there were two natural disasters that kept us on our feet.

Man-Yi

The first was the landfall of Typhoon Man-Yi which struck the island of Okinawa then made it’s way up the east coast of Japan to Tokyo. At it’s peak it was a category 4 Typhoon that left surprisingly as far as I can find only around 9 dead and in many reports less then 150 missing at any given time. I am not sure what the final numbers were since I can not find a summary report.

Chu-Etso-Oki

The second was 2 days later as the Chu-Etso-Oki Earthquake struck the northwest part of Japan with a 6.6 magnitude shock with aftershocks 5 hours later. The total damage cause by the earthquake can be read in this report.

In Summary:

1. The first known case of a fire in a nuclear power plant resulting from an earthquake

2. A water leak led to the release into the sea of 2,432,432 pCi worth of radioactive water

Damage that in perspective is very little and very safe in comparison to oil refinery explosions or any number of other power plant failures.

Summary

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video taken by Christopher Hudgens

Festivals

What can a foreigner say about Japanese festivals? I can barely describe American small town street festivals so any attempt to describe another culture’s take you have only seen once over the course of two days is extremely hard and I barely know where to start.

Similarities & Differences

The one thing I can say is that even though the food is at times extremely different (soba noodles and ginger beer) it is also exactly the same (meat on a stick, cotton candy & snow cones). Even though the clothing is as opposite as you can get (kimonos) it’s limited use clothing for a visual dramatic look that is not worn on a daily basis is very familiar to anyone that has gone to a Texas festival (formal snake skin boots, ten gallon hats, show belt buckles) so the idea is not that strange. The main thing I got from attending the Fuchu area 20 year anniversary, that feeling of comfort & familiarity, is the last thing I expected. Continue reading »

If you ever visit Tokyo no mater what else you want to see or visit you have to spend one morning checking out the fish market on the coast. Get up at 5:30, catch the first train and see the largest (think 3-4 American football fields), cleanest (the smell is actually pleasing) and busiest market you have ever seen. It makes Shinjuku train station look slow and boring.

I was told that they move more seafood in that market then anywhere else in the world and it is a claim that is easily believable. Tuna the size of bathtubs, Octopus the color of blood. Entire tables covered with worms moving so much that you lose your sense of depth looking at it. Sea Urchins the size of Volleyballs. Regardless of your age or gag sensitivity this is something you can’t miss. If I had to see only one thing in all of Tokyo it would be this. Continue reading »

As I mentioned in 10min Tokyo(part 2) cell phones are the hot consumer electronics item in Tokyo. It is so much the case that even mentioning that it is as widespread as it is, is very much akin to saying Americans like bottled water. They are everywhere, they are seemingly used more the family television & they make 90% of American cell phones look like they were made by Playskool. The last 10% is pretty much made up of the iPhone and Samsung.

They do more, hold more, light up more, are customizable more and run circles around their American counterparts. Case is point is their ability to interpret 2D Barcode (also know as QR codes).

2D Barcode, I can hear you now going who cares if they can interpret them and what does that even mean? The short answer is:

1. Interpreting 2D Barcodes means they can take their cell phone and take a picture of a 2D Barcode anywhere they might come across one ( and this is everywhere in Tokyo, posters, TV commercials, on the train, on the bus, in a magazine, business cards & yes even fresh produce ) and the Barcode holds the website address (or any data some even contain small video clips) for whatever someone is promoting so that once you take a photo of it the cell phone recognizes it, reads it & loads the website. Until you have seen this in action it can be hard to understand.

2. Even though I think the skill is borderline pointless in America where most everyone surfs on a tower or laptop and our URLs are tailor made to be as short as humanly possible it is very odd to see a technology we either don’t have or haven’t passed up and forgotten. Walking around and slowly realizing and having to figure out the odd reason there are all these 2D Barcodes everywhere is society used by everyone from the most advanced programmer to the simplest grandmother only to realize it is something you have never heard off is both very fun and slightly off putting.

With the ability as I mentioned above to encode data for small video files (or large ones if you overlay a second color image and double the storage, if anyone develops that Patent tomorrow this is prior art and I want some credit ) this might catch on in the States but doubtful since we still do not make use of texting & cellphones the way other nations do.