the website of Mark S Bailen. . . writer, illustrator, and fake-nature photographer
Mt. Fuji stayed mostly hidden in the clouds, but the Japanese tourists didn’t seem to mind. They kept taking pics with this giant concrete black egg. No clue why. It reminded me of the famous woodcuts by the edo artist, Hokusai, “Thirty-Six Views of a Big-Ass Black Egg.”
After Hakone we took a bullet train to Osaka and located the Earth building. This must be where they run the show.
We stayed in the Umeda district of Osaka where the locals liked to keep potted gardens outside their dwellings. These gardens took over streets and sidewalks and were really cool. Even though they showed up in other Japanese cities, we started calling them Osaka gardens.
No longer able to protect the castle, Osaka put up blue cones and aluminum fencing. . .
it’s nice to know that an octopus can still find decent work in Japan. . . other than being food.
While staying in Osaka, we took a day trip to Hiroshima. My wife spotted this building and said, “It looks like a bomb went off.” Too soon?
Tour guide at the Peace Museum explains how bombing large populated areas not only causes death, injury, and loss of infrastructure, but psychological grief that gets passed down to younger generations. Luckily we don’t have to worry about these problems today.
The gift shop in the Peace Museum was called the Peace Creation Factory. . . Skeptical.
Just outside Hiroshima is this little island called Miyajima, famous for the Itsukushima shrine. Even though it’s overrun with tourists, this floating torii gate was one of the coolest things we visited. After the tide goes out, you can walk up to the shrine and experience it in a completely different way.
Miyajima had actual Japanese wildlife. Sort of. These sika deer were pathologically friendly. Below, one waits for a table at a restaurant.
