Almost get lost in Singapore

I visited a good old friend of mine who is living in Singapore and enjoyed a few days off there with her.  She showed me around the city. 

Singapore is a very beautiful country as it’s called “Garden City,” but we had some problems.  Whenever she drove in newly developed area, which she was not familiar with, she got very frustrated.  She started complaining a lot about how the traffic guiding system there was useless.  I completely agree with her. 

Suppose we go to Marina Bay by car, which is a must-go place for tourists.  We’ll never get there just by following the traffic signboards.  There is no information on which neighborhood the road will take you to.  It just only the street name is printed.  And what is worse, the street names are quite confusing, for example, there are Marina avenue, Marina street, Marina road.

Beside, Singapore has a lot of one-way roads.  It’s surely effective for lessening traffic jam, but, on the contrary, we need to go an extra mile to finally get to our destination, which we can see very close by.  Once we take the wrong way, it seems that we would go away more and more from our destination.  As a result, we often ended up pulling over and asking taxi drivers for the directions which way we should go.  

Singapore is a country as small as Tokyo 23 wards.  I hear that they intentionally make street one way so that people can’t reach their destination quickly and they feel the land wider than it actually is, though I don’t know it’s true or not.  However, one thing’s for sure.  The city is planned as if it was a maze for visitors. 

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Photo: new Asia republic

Where do we come from?

Where do we come from?  What are we?  Where are we going to?

It’s a title of Paul Gauguin’s great masterpiece, but people must have thought the same thing when they were teenagers, or they do even now as an adult.  It seems to be an eternal theme of the human beings.

I still don’t have the foggiest idea about it, but I think that there might be something related to in and around the area I often visit.  Laos is one of my favorite countries and I think that the reason why I’m hooked on the nation is my nostalgia for something we Japanese already had lost.  However, there might be more to it than that.

There is a theory in cultural anthropology called “East Asian evergreen forest culture theory” that Kansuke Nakao and Koumei Sasaki advocated more than 45 years ago.  It explains that the major elements of Japanese traditional life and culture are also seen in Yunnan province and its adjacent areas, Eastern India, Nepal, Thai, Laos, Southern China and Taiwan.  In this theory, the area is called East Asian evergreen zone.

People in the zone share many customs and habits, for example, eating sticky rice, fermented foods such as natto and a kind of sushi, using urushi lacquer and growing cocoons for silk weaving.  And also, we can see some similariies in housing, clothing and more.

The more I get to know the theory, the more I’m interested in the area.  What I have seen in the villages of Laos is not just nostalgia, but it might be the things that have the same roots. 

photo: Laos Japan research & consulting

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The world largest fireworks display at Katakai

My summer has gone with thousands of sparkles of fireworks display and people’s prayers for their beloved ones.  This summer was very hot and long for me but I had a very good finale.

I went to Katakai in Niigata prefecture to see the world largest fireworks display.    Katakai’s fireworks display has 400 years of history and it’s known as the first place where they set off 3-shaku dama (90cm in diameter) fireworks.  Beside, in 1985, they successfully shot off a 4-shaku dama (120cm in diameter) fireworks for the very first time in the world.

I was amazed that they set off tons of shaku dama size fireworks back-to-back.  And my excitement went to the climax when I saw my dream 4-shaku dama fireworks at the end of the festival.  It lifted off higher and higher into the night sky and exploded with a huge sound that even shook the ground.  It was more like a rocket rather than fireworks.

What makes Katakai different from other fireworks display is not just how big the festival is.  A very unique thing of Katakai is that each firework is dedicated to the local shrine by residents with their variety of prayers.  Finance-wise, it is an independent event and village people themselves foot the bill.

Prayers may go to celebrate birth of a baby, marriage, longevity, or to commemorate family members.  There are announcements of their own message before setting up their fireworks.  It’s like this: Father, your grandson, Shota is now becoming 3 year old. He is a very good boy. We hope you watch his growth and the fireworks that we shoot with our love to you.

It’s very human and sometimes touching.  We looked up the sky, which illumination and people’s thought spread beautifully. 

They carefully set the world largest 4-shaku dama fireworks (1.2m in diameter, weight 420 kg)  into the iron tube, which is 5.2m.  

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