James Van Dyne

After almost 3 years in Japan, I finally went to my second Hanabi (fireworks). However, this is my first real time attending. That is, arriving early, finding a good place, putting out a tarp, and having a few beers and relaxing. Summer entertainment is top notch in Japan. I should have read a bit more [...]

Waking up at 8am on Day 2, I had no idea how difficult the day was to be. I had heard that I was going to be carrying the children’s mikoshi. I had seen it, it looked much smaller than the regular mikoshi that I had carried the day before.

It’s that time of year again: time to carry a 800 kilo god taxi around town. This time was a little different because I sort of knew what was going on. I knew the course for the most part.

My trip to Fukuoka was short but sweet. Compared to Yokohama I rather enjoyed the relative lack of people. Even for the largest city on Kyushu it felt like my little ward in Yokohama had more people than Hakata station.

I visited Fukuoka for the first time since my first trip to Japan in 2006. On my first visit I took the Shinkansen directly after a trans-pacific flight to Nagoya and spoke next to no Japanese. This time things were different.