From Geisha Asobi comes this: Japan Seldom Asked Questions. This is the site for you if you’ve ever wanted to know how the JR man gets home at night (he doesn’t), what does MOS Burger mean (Mountain-Ocean-Sun), why do we call it “Japan” when they call it “Nihon” (because in Chinese 日本 is pronounced “Zhr Pen”), and why do Anime characters have big eyes (because of Betty Boop!).

Somehow this reminds me of another site I found at MeFi recently, cultural and etiquette advice for countries all over the world. They even have tips for Taiwan! Also interesting are their tips for dealing with Americans. I could learn something here:

The only proper answers to the greetings “How do you do?” “How are you?” or “How are you doing?” are “Fine,” “Great,” or “Very well, thank you.” This is not a request for information about your well-being; it is simply a pleasantry.

If there’s one thing you can count on me to do, it’s post links to people’s Japan pictures. Here I go again.

This guy, who is apparently really cool (evidence: he likes Amigas, and has a Net Yaroze page.), has two galleries of pictures from Japan.

This is the picture that especially caught my eye:

Been there, played that! We put out the mayor. He was on fire.

A kitchen worker hits a water rat on the head to stun it before it is killed for a meal in a restaurant in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.

Jenny found this site today, and sent me a link at work but I was all “whatever” and didn’t look at it. I SHOULD HAVE.

Ginger Wong’s Gingervitis

For one thing, she’s currently in Taiwan and has been taking lots and lots of pictures and posting cool stories. That would have been good enough. But then we noticed a link labeled “blatant self-endorsement” to Old Master Q Comics. WOW! She created the site for Old Master Q! You probably have never heard of it, but Old Master Q is an absolutely super famous and super good Chinese comic strip. Go ahead and read some, mostly you don’t need to read Chinese to get the jokes. Mostly.

They’ve made lots of Master Q movies over the years, from black and white to fancy computer graphics:

Then we explored further, and found this page explaining her involvement with Old Master Q. Alfonso Wong, the guy who created Old Master Q, is her Grandfather! Whoa!

The other day I noticed a LJ user linking to my Tokyo pictures. Today I have randomly found a different LJ user’s different Tokyo pictures.

She has lots of other content online too.

more

(via boing boing)

Here’s some pictures from 龍山寺 (Lungshan Temple) that I never posted. Each clicks to a larger version. You might be interested in some English background information about the temple.

At the end of one busy day in Taiwan, Jenny and I went to the temple to meet up with her cousin Yvonne. She was a little late, so we took the opportunity to take some night shots of the temple.

Here’s me by the waterfall in the courtyard. Lots of older people hang around there, talking with friends.

Detail of some of the carvings on the roof:

A peaceful scene, inside the temple. People seem to be there praying or making offerings all hours of the day and night.

A close up of a big incense urn:

Inside the temple there are many gods that you pray to for different things. Or, if you just want generic heavenly providence, there is a recommended course of gods to follow, culminating with prayer to 觀音 - Guan Yin, the goddess of mercy, and the temple’s main god. (the temple we visited in Tokyo is also for Guan Yin, who is called Kannon in Japanese)

We saw a pair of girls, maybe Japanese tourists, asking one of the other gods to bless their friendship. They were doing some little ritual with a monk there, I assume it was going well because they appeared to be happy. Jenny and I both have forgotten the exact details of what they did, we do remember it involved a piece of red string.

Yvonne eventually arrived, with Jenny’s Aunt. We all went out for dinner nearby, and then shopped in one of the seedier night markets for a bit. Jenny wanted to go rent some comic books that she had never finished reading as a kid, but I wasn’t ready to go home yet. We parted on the subway, and I was off to see what sort of extremely minor adventures I could find.

(via Geisha asobi)

Lucky for me I just subscribed to this crummy website the other day, because otherwise I would have missed out on his link to Sushicam, an excellent Tokyo photoblog.

And while you’re at crummy.com make sure to see Tonight’s Episode.

I had never heard of this until last time we were in Taiwan, and we went up to the top of the Shin Kong building, and I saw a park in Taipei I didn’t remember ever going to. I asked Jenny’s cousin Yvonne, “What’s that?”

Learn about 228 at the Taipei Times

The 228 Incident was a military crackdown on civilian protests that broke out on Feb. 27, 1947, against the KMT administration. Historians estimate that around 30,000 people were killed.

A a female cigarette vendor who was selling illegal cigarettes to make ends meet was caught by KMT revenue agents on Yen-ping North Road in Taipei City. The Tobacco Monopoly Bureau agents injured her and mistakenly killed a bystander.

Crowds demonstrated in protest, demanding punishment of the killers. They were, however, met with gunfire, igniting a fury of widespread public protest across the island the following day. To resolve the conflict, Chen Yi — then chief executive officer of the Taiwan Provincial Government — requested military assistance from Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who later dispatched troops to Taiwan.

I found a new site, JapanNewbie.com, on the JvJ message boards. It’s run by Harvey Beasley who works for GE Japan in Tokyo. It’s got regular weblog type content, as well as tons of articles about how to live, study, and work in Japan.

And pictures.

A new weblog for your consideration. It should get good sometime next week.

Joe VS Japan

It’s real, and it’s spectacular. Next time we’re in Taipei, this is on the list, along with 好吃國 which we saw our first time there, but was closed to move the second time we were there.

I only wanted to go to 好吃國 because the name reminds me of 小人國.

This should be what computer science textbooks show when they try to explain what a deadlock is.

That picture is by Chuck @ China who has TONS AND TONS AND TONS of other pictures and stories about China. He seems to especially like high strangeness phenomena:

That picture was taken in America World, which he found near Hangzhou. They have a full size White House, along with replicas of other American monuments.

He also has a weblog, ch-ch-ch-ch-china.

I think this picture that I took is every bit as good as that fancy Reuters picture I linked yesterday.

I like weird buildings, so I like these buildings:

That picture is part of a travelog type page by this guy Peter Merholz, who shares my love of BroadVision. He even claims to have worked with BV at Outpost.com, although nobody there seems to remember him. Outpost is the same place where I encountered, and attempted to destroy, BroadVision.

As far as I know, buried deep under layers of Apache, JSP, and Servlets, hidden inside concentric spheres of page mungers, cron jobs, and Perl scripts, the black heart of BroadVision still beats at the very core of Outpost.

Update: Peter contacted me, it turns out he did a brief interface assessment for Outpost, and made some suggestions, but they couldn’t happen, because of course BV sucks.

robot wisdom today linked to a really cool night panorama of Tokyo. If you go to the homepage of that site, and can manage to deal with site navigation all in Japanese, you’ll be rewarded with hundreds of other equally cool Tokyo night scenes. This is extra interesting to me because for most of them I can say “been there”.

If you can’t deal with the Japanese site navigation, there is a backdoor to see all the images. Just go to http://tokyoyakei.cool.ne.jp/tokyo/ and browse through the directories, conveniently named in English (sort of).