In my May 21 column in The Japan Times, I wrote about hikyaku 飛脚, the “flying legs” couriers who moved letters and packages around Japan until the late 19th century when a modern postal system was created. The photo above, attributed to photographer Felice Beato , shows one of these colorful couriers, who ran on foot between postal stations.
In the article, I explained how to find hikyaku in woodblock prints, by knowing what to look for. Test yourself with this famous print by Hiroshige:
Yup. The loin cloth and box on the end of a pole are the giveaways. Here’s a detail, so you can get a good look at his get up. (This print is of Hiratsuka, from the Hoeido edition of ‘The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido Road.’)
There’s a pair of hikyaku in this lovely Hokusai print, from the 100 Views of Mount Fuji series. FYI, in 1696, it took 96 hours for a letter to go from Edo to Osaka. Express service took 82 hours, but with the right incentives delivery could be achieved in 56-60 hours.
Finally, here’s a photo of a Sagawa Express truck with corporate mascot Hikyaku-kun, who also got a good mention in my article.
If you’d like to try hefting one of those boxes, you can do so on the third floor of the Tei Park Communications Museum in Tokyo.
In my May 21 column in The Japan Times, and the blog post above, I wrote about the history of postal service in Japan. So I’m giving away two sets of free tickets to the Tei Park Communications Museum in Otemachi, Tokyo, each of which is good for up to three people.
There’s lots to do in the museum besides following my footsteps on the search for the origin of the 〒 symbol. You can check out the museum’s extensive collection of postage stamps from around the world, for example, or learn about the history of telegraph and telephones in Japan. Little kids will enjoy getting on one of those cute red motorbikes to play the mail-delivery simulation.
Let’s limit this giveaway to residents of Japan, and to be fair to others, please enter only if you’ve got a reasonable chance of using the tickets before the end of August. I won’t use your personal information for any reason. I won’t even keep it. I’ll use a computer to randomly select a winner at 8 am, Tokyo time, on May 31. I’ll mail the tickets out the same day, so please be sure to give me your mailing address as well as your name and email address. You can use the contact form below to enter.
No need to cry if you don’t win: regular admission won’t break the bank: it’s just 110 yen for adults and 50 yen for children. On Sundays and National Holidays, there is no charge for school-age children (elementary, middle-school and high school-school). Still, it’s fun to win something, right?
In my April 16 column in The Japan Times, I reveal the real rationale for the 5 o’clock bell. For the benefit of the uninitiated, I’m referring to a daily broadcast of music that is played on outdoor speakers in virtually every city, town and village in Japan. Most people assume the broadcast is to remind children to head home before dark, but that’s not the true purpose. To learn what is, please read the article; here, I’m just providing samples so you can hear the sounds for yourself.
Where I live the music played every day at 5 o’clock is “Yuyake koyake,” 夕焼小焼, a Japanese folksong written in 1923. Here’s how it plays in the city of Kashiwa in Chiba Prefecture:
Another popular choice is “Ieji” 家路, which means “the road home.” Some of you may know it as “Going Home,”based on a Dvorak melody (Largo, from the New World Symphony). Here’s a recording of it playing in Fukuroi City, Shizuoka Prefecture.
Fujimi City in Saitama made a rather interesting selection:
That was “Love is Blue,” or 恋はみずいろKoi wa mizu iro.
And finally, here’s “Go Tell Aunt Rhody,” as played at noon in Amakusa, Kumamoto Prefecture. In Japanese, it’s called “Musunde hiraite” むすんでひらいて in Japanese.
There are hundreds of these videos on YouTube. I found one that had been viewed 37,976 times since it was posted four years ago.
Update May 8: As per a reader request, I’m adding a link to the blog mentioned in the JT column
The cherry blossom season is winding down here in Tokyo. Despite the generally cold and cloudy weather, there were plenty of people out enjoying picnics under the flowers in various states of drunkenness.
And the usual frenzy of cherry-themed everything, including these white-chocolate and cherry-blossom coffee drinks at Starbuck’s.
In the midst of this, I finally heard a convincing explanation as to why the heck Japanese love cherry blossoms so much. It came while I was working on a new episode of Design Talks, a new NHK show I mentioned in an earlier post.
The guest on this episode was the esteemed master gardener Sano Toemon XVI 佐野藤右衛門. He explained that in very olden times, before Japanese began to cultivate cherry trees for viewing pleasure, people watched the wild cherry trees in the mountains so they’d know when to plant their rice. When the cherries began to bloom, he said, it was time to plant the rice seeds in the seed beds. When the blossoms fell and the leaves began to emerge, it was the proper time to transplant the seedlings into the paddies. In short, the cherry blossoms served as an invaluable rice-planting guide.
“You can’t separate rice from cherry blossoms,” Sano asserted. (Actually, that’s my translation, used in the show. What he said in Japanese was 米と桜は切っても切り離せない kome to sakura wa kittemo kirihanasenai.)
Let’s presume that farmers who followed this wisdom got decent harvests and enough food to see them through the winter. And those who didn’t starved and disappeared from the gene pool. Wouldn’t it follow that, over generations and generations, a propensity for cherry-watching would develop in the DNA? And couldn’t that explain the way the whole country gets fixated on cherry blossoms each spring?
But don’t take my word for it; please watch the show. If you live outside of Japan and get NHK World, you can look up the exact broadcast time in your area (it airs several times during the day) on the schedule page. If you live in Japan, you have to watch on your computer through the NHK World website, via streaming in a little box in the top right corner of the screen marked “Now on Air.” The cherry blossom episode of Design Talks streams April 4 at 10:30, 14:30, 18:30 and 22:30.
If you understand Japanese, check out this video in which Sano attests that he’s seen a change in the cherry blossoms due to global warming. He says there are fewer buds on the trees. If you don’t understand Japanese, watch anyway just to see that get-up he’s got on his head.
Foreigners ask the darnedest questions, and Japanese are forever worrying about being able to answer. Enter “Lillian,” a high-school exchange student from the United States who is full of questions about Japan. Or more precisely, enter 留学生Ｌｉｌｌｉａｎの教えて！日本のコト — Ryūgakusei Lillian no oshiete! Nihon no koto (Foreign Student Lillian’s “Teach Me About Japan!”).
Lillian is my alter ego in The Japan Times ST, the newly revampled weekly newspaper for Japanese studying English. Fear not, I’m still doing my longer, more detailed answers to foreigner’s questions in my So, What the Heck is That? column in the daily paper.
Like that feature, the new ST column answers foreigner’s questions about Japan, but the ST target is Japanese who want to learn how to answer such questions in English. The column includes hints in Japanese that provide background and helpful vocabulary.
Foreigner’s questions about Japan are excellent English-teaching tools because they so often come as a complete surprise to Japanese people. You can’t teach someone until you’ve got their attention, and these questions definitely get student’s attention.
Actually, Prof. John Rucynski of Okayama University and I “wrote the book on this,” with our textbook Surprising Japan, released this month and already in use in Japanese universities around the country. It’s also now available on Amazon Japan: ニッポンの不思議―Surprising Japan!.
Issued every Friday, The Japan Times ST is sold at newsstands and in book stores, or can be ordered by subscription. Please check it out. If you teach English in Japan, consider using it with your students! If you’re learning English, let Lillian help you formulate your own answers. We’ll be in ST every week!
In my March 19 column in The Japan Times, I wrote about the popularity in Japan of white gloves. As I explained, although white work gloves are widely used in many professions, they are no longer even made in Japan. Domestic manufacturers now focus on specialty products such as thermal sports gloves and high-quality golf gloves.
The current darling of the domestic industry, because it’s created a whole new market for gloves in the summer, is the UV-cut glove, which supposedly protects the hands from UV rays. Japanese are very conscious of skin care and both men and women make efforts to stay out of the sun.
So just in time for spring and summer, here’s an example of the trendy UV-cut glove, this one made from a reflective nylon material called X-Static. It comes in ever-popular white as well as black and is even Smart-Phone compatible.
The links above are for Amazon Japan because of all the shopping sites in Japan, I think Amazon is relatively easy for foreigners to use.
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and is even Smart-Phone compatible.
