Cat Bar Sign

A sign for "Ma no Su" (Devil's Nest), a bar in the restaurant district in Tenmonkan.

Menu Ukiyo-e

I like these menu cards for a restaurant in Tenmonkan. The artwork is all based on famous Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, and are promoting specific meal sets.

Ichiban Gai Trick Art

Ichiban Gai is a shopping district right next to the east entrance of Kagoshima Chuo train station, but is in direct competition with the Tenmonkan shopping district about a 0.5 mile farther away. Ichiban Gai has been losing customers to Tenmonkan for years, and to counter this, they put up trick art along the main walkway.

The sign says that there are 10 works of trick art along the main avenue, but I walked all over the area for an hour, and I located one extra piece on a side street. So there. I compiled the photos, plus one short video of an installation piece, into a youtube video.

Direct youtube link

Chihayafuru and Toppo

Chihayafuru is a girl's manga about a school girl that decided to compete at the national level for karuta. I wrote about karuta a couple years ago when I attended a tournament in Kagoshima. It's a card game between two players, where you have several cards on the floor at one time. Each card has an illustration and a couple lines of a poem on the front. An announcer reads the poem, and the first player to slap the correct card away wins that round. A referee keeps score, and when two players are finished playing against each other, the group rotates so that everyone plays against everyone else in the group. In the manga, Chihayu had been a talented karuta player as a child, but her school team soon broke up. In high school, she decides to start a new club, and she tries to become the best karuta player in the world.



Snack food maker Lotte tied up their Toppo brand pretzels with the Chihayafuru manga to create a series of 9 different box designs (3 designs per Toppo flavor).

I was at a nearby drug store, and getting hungry, so I looked for the cheapest snack they had. They were running a discount price on Toppo, so I grabbed the closest box to me. It wasn't until later that I realized that the box had  manga-themed art on it. I don't read this manga, so I have no intrinsic interest in it. The sticks in the box are a kind of long, thin sweet pretzel with a chocolate filling. Nothing really spectacular, but sufficiently filling for the reduced price of about 75 cents USD.

Looking Down

"You'll never find rainbow if you're looking down. - Charlie Chaplin -"
The irony is that the sign is below eye level, so you have to look down to see it. There's no mention of what restaurant this is for, but I do know it's on the second floor of the building. It'd be funny if the place's name is "Rainbow," but I don't think it is...

September Moon

Another rare clear sky at the end of September, this time at 5 PM, when the sun was up and the moon stood out really well.

Yamakataya Culture Classes Exhibition, Sept. 30

As mentioned before, the Yamakataya department store offers "open campus"-style classes during the week, and every few months the students get to demonstrate their skills in front of an outside audience. Based on the schedule this time, the most popular classes are for hula, dancing, and singing, although there was one group that played guitar. I stopped by long enough to catch the last two groups - rhythm dancing and "Music from our street." Neither were interesting enough to justify shooting video.



The rhythm dancers are just finishing their set, and the singers are waiting on the sidelines.



I'd estimate that there were 150 people in the audience at 3 PM.



I only stuck around long enough for one song, which was a chorale-like Japanese folk song.
I think past exhibitions have been more interesting.