Back in 2019, I found a small illustration of a Kagouchi-dai at the craft museum in Kyoto. Yesterday, I found an actual kagouchi-dai at the Adachi Kumihimo Gallery, and after I purchased a large supply of pre-cut silk for braiding, I asked for permission to take lots of pictures of it, so I can build one.

Next up, Matsui Shuzo sake brewery, makers of Kagura. The first time we went to Hanaroku for dinner, we ordered sake flights that were paired with the course meals. Kagura was paired with the A5 wagyu, and every time we’ve been back, we skip the courses and just order the A5 and the Kagura.

It doesn’t seem to be exported, so a few bottles will end up in our luggage. Hopefully we’ll be able to sample the blue, the clear, the yuzu liqueur, the east wind, the south wind, the west wind, …

Of course, if we sample all their sake and buy several bottles, we might not do anything else today. 😁

Loosely related, at our second-favorite gyoza joint, Tiger Gyoza Hall just off Shijo, something else caught our eyes while filling up on their bukkuri gyoza, and we’re going to be making it at home: dan-dan potato salad.

Osaka’s Koreatown is clearly the real thing, even though Remo and Chiun must have had the day off.

As a tourist destination, though, it does not live up to the hype. Admittedly it was pouring down rain, but even so, there was basically nothing to buy unless you were into kimchi and knockoff k-pop pretty-boy merch, and nothing to see except a typical mostly-food shopping street.

Ditto the “retro” shopping district around Tsutenkaku Tower, whose JNTO page was actually deleted recently, so I can’t quote it without using the Wayback machine. TL/DR: mostly closed, and what was open was less interesting than kimchi and knockoff k-pop pretty-boy merch. There was a crew working on the sign, so maybe they’re revitalizing it. Or tearing it down completely.

Fortunately, we were mostly just killing time on a rainy day waiting to get into Tenpei Gyoza near Umeda Station, which is a religious experience. They do one thing, and they do it very, very well. Combined with the over-the-top food floors in the Hankyu building, we have vowed never to stay in any of the hotels around Osaka/Umeda stations, unless we plan to die of a calorie overdose.

Annoying note: Google Maps has weird UI issues on iPhones. Several times it got stuck in navigation and refused to show the search box until we force-restarted the app, on other occasions it wouldn’t enter the turn-by-turn navigation for walking, and then sometimes when it did the instructions would be in Japanese, but most annoying, it was not at all clear when it was using a mix of indoor and outdoor routes.

We ended up taking twice as long to reach Tenpei as necessary, in the rain, because it didn’t make it clear at the start of the walk that it was taking us via a nice dry underground passage. The surface streets that it always displayed almost lined up, most of the time, but because it thought we were following along the undisplayed indoor path, it assumed the GPS location was approximate, and never gave us any information that would have corrected the accumulated errors.

Coming back, we caught the brief flash of a “hey, this route goes indoors” popup, and stayed dry all the way back to the station.

There were plenty of kimono-clad cuties at Kiyomizu-dera, most marred by masks that didn’t match their style, but I saw only one in 2D, working the lobby of Bic Camera at Kyoto Station.

Later, we were eating lunch somewhere, and Yofukashi No Uta started playing, so I looked around the room for suspiciously-hot vampire chicks. I didn’t find any, even though Falling came on about three songs later.

Related, Spy×Family is clearly the hot show right now, based on the book and merchandise displays. I did find an endcap with A-cup Alchemist and Flatcat & Sword manga volumes, but no sign of Beast Tamer or Hoe Harem. Definitely nothing for Futoku No Guild. 😁

I walked right past this on the way to the Uji Tea Dojo after getting katsu curry udon at Nakamura Udon in Uji; my sister didn’t understand why I had to go back and get a picture. There was another “slow children at play” sort of sign nearby, but I didn’t recognize the character.

I doubt any of the residents of this Black Cat village are as cute as Fran, but they’re definitely old enough for a career in fan-service.

Quick preliminary test of the new camera body’s low-light capability (double-sized if you open it in another tab):

This is the view of the neighbor’s house from my back yard, with no streetlights or other lighting, at midnight with no moon. It’s soft and quite noisy, but it’s clear and in-focus.

It’s also about three stops overexposed, because this is what the scene looked like to the naked eye:

In other words, it was able to successfully meter and auto-focus (admittedly with help from the built-in focus lamp) in conditions where I couldn’t even see that there were fences. Exposure was 1/30 at f/1.2, hand-held at ISO 204,800. By comparison, the latest and greatest iPhone tops out at ISO 12,768 with an f/1.78 lens, which would give a ~1.2-second exposure, if it could meter the scene at all.

Here’s a crop showing what the noise looks like on the full-sized image. Rough, but there’s still some good detail, and it can be cleaned up and sharpened.

No temple, castle, or museum is even close to this dark inside, and I haven’t even tried the built-in HDR features or adjustable Dynamic-Range Optimization yet, so I don’t think I’ll have any trouble getting clear, crisp pictures of anything I can see. The zoom I’m taking has a constant f/4 aperture, so there may be conditions where it has to use a noisier ISO setting, but I don’t think I’ll need to crank it up to even 100K, much less this setting.

And, of course, I’ll be carrying my small LitraPro color-corrected USB-powered LED light. Which is sadly discontinued now that Logitech owns Litra and just used their IP to build a clip-on light for streamers. It looks like the Luxli Fiddle is the current hotness for pocketable LED lighting, although it’s only half as bright as the LitraPro.

Metering digression: the Sony A7S III’s meter sensitivity is EV -3 with an f/2.0 lens; with the 50mm f/1.2 that’s still only EV -4.5, and this exposure computes to EV -5.5, so it got a little help from the focus lamp, even though it was half-blocked by the lens hood.

Juxtaposition, Twitter style

66% No Yuuwaku revisited

So, quite some time ago I posted the cover art for the Japanese release of Meatloaf’s Two out of three ain’t bad single, which translated the title as “Two-thirds of Temptation”. Randomly, I found two things recently: a fan translation of the English lyrics, and the actual lyrics that were included with the single:

一晩中話し合ってもいいけど、
どうにもならないさ
言うことはすべて言ったよ、
もう何も残ってないさ

一晩中でも泣くがいいさ、
僕の気持は変わらないよ
外には雪が積っている、
僕に行かさないでおくれ

僕は努力した、
君を大切にしてる事を示そうとした
僕は言葉に疲れ、声も出なかった
僕の目からは涙でなく、 つららが下がった

僕に出来ることはこう言い続けるだけ
“君が欲しいんだ、君が必要なんだ”　とね
でももう君を愛することは出来ないよ
さあ悲しまないで
３人の内、
２人が出て行くってのは悪い事じゃないさ

TL/DR: it’s just the first verse, simplified but pretty much on target until you reach the last two lines, which are as far off as the title but in a completely different direction: (roughly) “out of three people, it’s not a bad thing when two of them leave”.

Props to the big G for Google Lens; when I fed it this JPG in the hopes of finding a higher-resolution source (because no one had ever transcribed these lyrics), it couldn’t find one but still managed to OCR almost all of the kanji correctly. The few errors were easily caught and corrected.

The government has ordered all schools to close until April. Graduation ceremonies and many public festivals have been canceled. The Studio Ghibli Museum has shut down until March 17th, hoping it will be safe to re-open by then. The US State Department has a level 2 advisory on travel to Japan, instructing travellers to “exercise increased caution”.

I keep checking to make sure our flights haven’t been canceled. And I really need to get rid of the last of the usual sinus infection that followed the cold I had at the beginning of February; I don’t think even the slightest cough or sniffle will amuse the Immigration counter at Haneda.

The good news is that we’re unlikely to get stuck in a huge sweaty crowd at Immigration this time. If they’re still letting people in at all by then…

As for what to do once we’re there, crowds are out. I suspect the monthly craft and flea markets will all be canceled. Popular shopping areas like Teramachi and Nishiki will either be ghost towns or very off our list. This may end up being a temple/museum/restaurant trip with carefully-selected shopping.

I was looking over the shop list at Shibuya Parco (note: I really hate sites that give a “language option” button that just forwards the page through an automatic translator), and noticed a pub with an interesting name: 真さか, which can be read as both “real booze” and “as if!”.

Sadly, clicking on the link reveals the ugly truth:

レモンサワーとVEGAN餃子VEGAN唐揚げのお店

“This is a lemon sour, vegan gyoza, and vegan kara-age shop.”

Not only no, but hell no.

I was also sad to discover that the Candy Stripper shop is not for men.

On the bright side, they’ve got a Condomania, which is always good for tourist pictures.