Trombone Valentine's Chalk Art

The Trombone cafe sign board has new art.



Is giving hot coffee to a snowman a good idea?



Won't you come in together? We're waiting for you.
(I think the "hotto" part is a play on "hot". You'll get a warm reception from them.)

Tokyo Stadium Papercraft

There's a manga in Big Original Comic titled Sanchome no Yuuhi (Sunset on Third Street). Technically, "chome" is used to refer to specific neighborhoods or groups of city blocks, rather than streets. Anyway, the stories are set in Tokyo between 1955 and 1964, and the artist, Ryouhei Saigan, decided to provide a papercraft sheet for the old Tokyo Stadium (circa 1964) in the Feb. 20 issue.



In general, it's just a bunch of punch-out pieces on thick card stock, with a "tab A in slot A" structure. The only place there was any need for glue was on the fold-over parts of the lighting poles, where the upper halves of the parts had artwork on both the front and back faces. I did try gluing down a few of the tabs underneath the bottom of the ground sheet to make it sit more flat, but that turned out to take too long and wasn't worth the effort.



Overall, it took maybe 30-40 minutes. I wasn't timing myself.



Turned out pretty well, actually. Maybe about 5" x 8" x 2" high.

Genki City

My original plan on Sunday was to finish a contract project early in the afternoon, go back to Terukuni Shrine around 2 PM to buy some raw honey, then swing by Amu Plaza to check in on the Choko-Paku (Valentine's Day chocolate sale) event there. After that, maybe read a bit at a coffee shop and and work on the blog for a while in the evening. The main thing was in wanting to get the raw honey.



However, as I was about to walk out the door, I got roped into a shopping trip that started down at Dolphin Port. There, I discovered the Genki City event, which is basically people selling local fish products and flowers. One table had a poster advertising the big sand sculpture contest down in Ibusuki, and you could mold volcano ash-heavy sand into the heads of Anpan-man and Doreamon if you wanted to.



The main stuff was in a kind of tent city in the Dolphin Port parking lot. They did have a few food trucks though, selling ramen, tapioca drinks and similar circus foods.



One schedule showed various foamhead characters making appearances at different hours. Turtle Guy here was just heading off to the changing room to get out of his costume.



Some of the vendors and their produce.



They had speakers hooked up all around Dolphin Port blaring out the Emcees as they interviewed the vendors and tried to get customers to actually buy stuff. I'm not sure if I've seen the woman before.



I have seen this guy at other events. I think he's a radio or TV personality for MBC Broadcasting.

I was given just enough time to take a few photos before I got dragged off for grocery shopping at one souvenir/food store, and then hanging around at Tully's Coffee for a couple hours. We then headed off to Maruya Gardens to read science magazines in Junkudou Books, followed by dinner at an oyster restaurant in Tenmonkan. I kept hoping that I'd get the chance to get away long enough to make the half-mile walk over to Terukuni Shrine before their parking lot market closed, but that never happened. We finally got back home at 8 PM. I processed the photos I'd taken over the last week, and uploaded them to Mediafire. However, when I tried to copy-paste the links to notepad and write up these blog entries, I found out that one of the Mediafire servers was down again and 20% of the photo files (which was like one out of each batch of event photos) had dead links. I gave up and went to bed early.

I never did get that raw honey. Sigh.

Terukuni Shrine Market, Feb. 8-9

Last Thursday, I was walking by Terukuni, near Central Park, and I noticed there was still a podium in the parking lot at about where there had been one on Monday for the Setsubun bean throwing madness. On Friday, construction workers were putting up some more tents, and I assumed they were preparing for one of their periodic outdoor markets. So, I decided to swing by on Saturday on my way back home from the English school in the middle of the afternoon.



Turned out I was right. Processed foods, some prepared foods (like takoyaki and soba), toys, crafts, jewelry, and weird stuff.



This doll looked much more creepy in person. I think I still hear it scratching around in the hallway outside at night...



The painted kitsune masks were there again this year, but I didn't see the artist, her husband or the rest of their entourage this time.



One table was handing out free samples of raw honey. Some of it was really good, but a bit on the expensive side. I decided on holding off on buying a bottle until I could check in the apartment to see if we needed any more. Turned out that we did. So, I planned on coming back on Sunday to get one. Unfortunately, that didn't work out, and by Monday all the tables were gone. Sigh. Maybe next time.

Sakurajima Big Food Fair

Saturday and Sunday, the space across from Lotteria had a food event for growers and shops on Sakurajima - the volcano island across from Kagoshima on the bay.



Mostly, it was just cafe-style stalls selling ramen and other dishes. There were a couple stalls that had shochu, daikon and kinkan (miniature tangerine-like things). Daikon, the big radishes shown above, are grown throughout the Kagoshima region, but are one of the few plants that thrive in the volcano ash-heavy soil on Sakurajima.



The stall here advertised soba and "hot-dish with Sakurajima radish."

I dropped by long enough to take pictures on my way in to the school on Saturday. I'd wanted to get coffee at the event if someone was selling it, but I couldn't find any there. After I got out at the end of my lessons, I swung by the Terukuni shrine on my way home to check in on a different event. So, I didn't return here on Saturday. I'd kind of been planning to come back on Sunday, but things got completely out of my control then and I missed my chance. Oh well. There'll always be a next time.

What You're Not Seeing

I went up to Amu Plaza recently, and suddenly discovered that the Tourist Information Center had been torn down. The footprint next to the escalator walls is barely recognizable as a darker patch on the tiles. I don't have a good photo of the building itself when it was there, so I can't show a "before" and "after." It was very useful for people trying to get bus schedules, and Chinese tourists trying to get directions back to their cruise ships at Dolphin Port (pre-coronavirus outbreak).

The information desk in the main train station underwent renovations for over a month, and I haven't noticed whether that is back open for business or not. Either way, it's kind of a shock to not see the TIC outside anymore, with no explanation for why it was taken down.

Small Adventure 71

Some months ago, I was just outside the Maruya Gardens department store, at the intersection waiting for the traffic light to change. There was a break in the cross traffic, so the next little bit of movement caught my attention really fast. There was a small brown blur of movement at the edge of my vision, to the right and down by my feet. At first, I thought it was a big mouse or a fat rat. This would have been a remarkable thing, since I've only seen one rat here before, about half a mile away, creeping around the edge of an office building, in the shadows late at night. But, this was in the middle of a bright sunny day.

I was about to jump back and let out a yelp when I looked down.

It was a dead leaf. The human brain is a weird thing.