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Wonky Vegetables and small cars
Mar. 15th, 2019 10:33 pmCars
====
The car we rented last week was a little Daihatsu 'Thor'. It is very boxy shape and has a tiny boot, though it is pretty big once the rear seat is folded down. The nearside read door slides electrically and a door not fully closed pulls itself to automatically.
Sitting in the back seat, I discovered more leg room than in any car I've owned and even more than most luxury cars I've been in.
You don't have to be in the country long before you become aware that there are 2 types of car numberplate: white and yellow. The yellow plates are reserved for 'Kei' (mini) cars. This was a category started by the post-war government to encourage manufacturers to make cheap runabouts for the hard pressed population. They had to be within certain emgine and body size limits, had lower tax and insurance and, at least in rural areas, were exepmt from the regulation that stipulated you had to prove you had adequate off-road parking. Our current rented car is one of these and has a 650cc engine. Mind you, many have both turbo and super-chargers to get the maximum 'umph' from their limited cc-s, so quite what the life expectancy of these overworked machines is, I don't know. That said, in places like Yakushima, where the maximum speed on the whole island is 60kph, they are probably the dominant vehicle.
Fruit & Veg.
============
On my visits to Japan I've often commented about the huge fruit and how they are always perfect. Surely there must be some less than perfect things grown here, you may think? Well, you do see TV programmes where fruit growers individually bag fruit to protect it and, I'm assuming, discard the small ones so the big ones can thrive. Even so, there must be the odd one with a blemish - surely.
Today we discovered where all the less than perfect fruit goes. We are staying near the small town of Hinatayama. There we found a ram-shackle building packed with mis-shapen fruit and vegetables. Boxes of marked and bruised apples you could pick from and fill a large bag for Y500, which compares rather well with the usual price of ~Y100 each. While 70p might seen steep for one apple, they do weight about as much as a small horse and could feed a family of four.
Blasphemy, blasphemy, they've all got it blasphemy
==================================================
I feel I must apologise in advance to my religious friends for this next section of musings. I hope no one gets personally offended.
One of today's visits was to the local shrine. There are shrines and temples. Temples are Buddhist and shrines are Shinto and where God resides. They are fantastic structures, with exquisite carvings and elabourate joints in huge baulks of timber, often cleverly flexible to withstand earthquakes. And they have to be because the roofs can be very weighty constructions of multiple layers of tiles or copper shingles.
Watching people visit a shrine, I'm always struck how they bow at the entrance, clap to call God's attention, put their hands together in prayer and bow when leaving. Also, when watching the priests, they wear complex hats and robes made from exquisitely woven textiles and you see them holding elabourate sticks, which they wave in the direction of the worshipers. I cannot but be reminded of scenes I've witnessed in Catholic or High Anglican services and I have to ask the question: "What is religion and what constitutes a 'True' religion?"
It seems odd to me that a culture that grew up with almost no influence from the Middle East (at lest, not initially) has some very similar rituals. Or maybe they didn't have, but the Shogun had them adopted when he banned both Budhhism and Christianity in the early C17th. But then, what is the nature of God? Of course, the Christian will say that Jesus was God's son sent to Earth. But why only to one small place which, as 'Jesus Christ Superstar' so aptly put it, had no mass communication? What about the natives of America or Japan? Why were they so ill-favoured? And I'm sure the Shinto priet is as wedded to his calling as the Christian priest or Imam is to theirs. So, whose God is the 'true' one? Of course, some schools of thought have it that they are all just different facets of the whole diamond that is God. There's no conclusion to these musings, just more musings...
====
The car we rented last week was a little Daihatsu 'Thor'. It is very boxy shape and has a tiny boot, though it is pretty big once the rear seat is folded down. The nearside read door slides electrically and a door not fully closed pulls itself to automatically.
Sitting in the back seat, I discovered more leg room than in any car I've owned and even more than most luxury cars I've been in.
You don't have to be in the country long before you become aware that there are 2 types of car numberplate: white and yellow. The yellow plates are reserved for 'Kei' (mini) cars. This was a category started by the post-war government to encourage manufacturers to make cheap runabouts for the hard pressed population. They had to be within certain emgine and body size limits, had lower tax and insurance and, at least in rural areas, were exepmt from the regulation that stipulated you had to prove you had adequate off-road parking. Our current rented car is one of these and has a 650cc engine. Mind you, many have both turbo and super-chargers to get the maximum 'umph' from their limited cc-s, so quite what the life expectancy of these overworked machines is, I don't know. That said, in places like Yakushima, where the maximum speed on the whole island is 60kph, they are probably the dominant vehicle.
Fruit & Veg.
============
On my visits to Japan I've often commented about the huge fruit and how they are always perfect. Surely there must be some less than perfect things grown here, you may think? Well, you do see TV programmes where fruit growers individually bag fruit to protect it and, I'm assuming, discard the small ones so the big ones can thrive. Even so, there must be the odd one with a blemish - surely.
Today we discovered where all the less than perfect fruit goes. We are staying near the small town of Hinatayama. There we found a ram-shackle building packed with mis-shapen fruit and vegetables. Boxes of marked and bruised apples you could pick from and fill a large bag for Y500, which compares rather well with the usual price of ~Y100 each. While 70p might seen steep for one apple, they do weight about as much as a small horse and could feed a family of four.
Blasphemy, blasphemy, they've all got it blasphemy
==================================================
I feel I must apologise in advance to my religious friends for this next section of musings. I hope no one gets personally offended.
One of today's visits was to the local shrine. There are shrines and temples. Temples are Buddhist and shrines are Shinto and where God resides. They are fantastic structures, with exquisite carvings and elabourate joints in huge baulks of timber, often cleverly flexible to withstand earthquakes. And they have to be because the roofs can be very weighty constructions of multiple layers of tiles or copper shingles.
Watching people visit a shrine, I'm always struck how they bow at the entrance, clap to call God's attention, put their hands together in prayer and bow when leaving. Also, when watching the priests, they wear complex hats and robes made from exquisitely woven textiles and you see them holding elabourate sticks, which they wave in the direction of the worshipers. I cannot but be reminded of scenes I've witnessed in Catholic or High Anglican services and I have to ask the question: "What is religion and what constitutes a 'True' religion?"
It seems odd to me that a culture that grew up with almost no influence from the Middle East (at lest, not initially) has some very similar rituals. Or maybe they didn't have, but the Shogun had them adopted when he banned both Budhhism and Christianity in the early C17th. But then, what is the nature of God? Of course, the Christian will say that Jesus was God's son sent to Earth. But why only to one small place which, as 'Jesus Christ Superstar' so aptly put it, had no mass communication? What about the natives of America or Japan? Why were they so ill-favoured? And I'm sure the Shinto priet is as wedded to his calling as the Christian priest or Imam is to theirs. So, whose God is the 'true' one? Of course, some schools of thought have it that they are all just different facets of the whole diamond that is God. There's no conclusion to these musings, just more musings...
