Day Six: Kamakura

what are these marvelous and curious things



i eventually end up in the home of a man i met teaching english in a city called shonandai, in the yokohama prefecture.

i shot the pictures above from a photo album he had full of pictures from pre-world war II japan. most of the pictures were of family. his father was a soldier in the japanese army fighting for the axis powers. the pictures i saw that werent of family were of soldiers training for war and in some cases showed combat pictures.

he is a record collector. his home contains over 3000 vinyl records and 4000 cds', most of them being bluegrass or country western styles of music. he loves for country music. he has a record player built in the turn of the century that plays vintage 78 records. this machine has to have the needle changed every time a new record is played and each record contains only two songs, one on each side.


we spent a few hours listening to old vinyl records. bob dylan and the beatles and all sorts of stuff. bluegrass has been the music that has stuck with me my whole life and indeed is the music that is part of my familial heritage. he has thousands of vinly records with this style of music, so we listened and listened and listened.

his record collection also contained a player that was one of the first models of music player invented by thomas edison. it plays cyllindrical shaped discs and was built also in the early 1900's.

my travels today were to a city called kamakura, which is also an old school japanese kind of town. its the home of many shrines, temples and the daibutsu, the biggest buddha...ive ever seen.

maybe theres another one somewhere in the world, but i dont know...ill have to keep looking.

it was raining most of the day, which made for things to contain a marginal amount of suckage. i wasnt able to playe my guitar for fear that it would become wet and furry balls would start to pop out of its back and create an epidemic of gremlins, which we all know are even worse than the swine flu.

or whats worse, the guitar could have melted.

apparently there was a typhoon that just came through this part of the world. im not sure though.

one of our stops was at a beautiful shrine that contained within it a garden. there was a turtle in this garden. i said hello to him and because he didnt speak japanese or english, he didnt understand. i later had a translator come and tell me that he was actually from france, and nobody in the vicinity knew how to speak a lick of french.

anyone looking at the shape of this small pond mind think it would be more appropriate to use for someone in the third reich, but no my friends, no. no nazi sympathizers in this country. this is not the old timey german swastika we have all learned to dislike, this is a symbol still commonly used today in buddhism and hinduism.

the germans, being buttmunchers, merely stole it from the decent religions that build beautiful places like this and used it for themselves.

the swastika the nazi party used was also a mirror of the one used in buddhism, its backwards.

because it was raining so much, during the day, it made things appear beautiful in a dreary kind of way. when youre out looking at things like shrines or temples, the sun doesnt have to be shining bright for us to see how beautiful they are. the spirit of these places alone is what makes them so beautiful.

we came to place where a fountain had formed in the side of a hill. you had to go through a tunnel carved in rock to get to it.

one of the legends of this place was that if you put your money into a little basket and washed it in some of this water, your money would grow and you would prosper.

so i took all my money out and i washed it, all the coin money at least. i asked if it was ok for me to was my paper money, and apparently paper money isnt meant to get wet. wet paper money is like wet underwear, it just doesnt feel right.


i honestly was hoping that i could strip down and take a dive in this pool so i could have my whole body become prosperous, but i held back. there were too many women around and i know if they had seen me, i would be in trouble.

im simply that good looking.

a glimpse of another small shrine built next to a small natural waterfall

and then i saw something else in that cave that i thought was amazing. there were huge origami creations hanging from the ceiling. they look like they had been made from hundreds and hundreds of paper cranes.

and as it turns out, they were. they were made from a thousand paper cranes.

an ancient japanese legend says that by making a thousand of these origami cranes, a wish of yours will be granted, hopefully by a crane, i mean, if youre lucky. for someone wishing for long life or a cure for a sickness of disease, this is a one way ticket to health. if a thousand cranes doesnt work for ya, youve always got the swine flu to fall back on, which cant be any worse than some stuff you might have to deal with.

the story of the thousand paper cranes became popularized from a story and play which was created about a girl trying to recover from radiation poisoning she had received from the detonation of the atomic bomb at hiroshima.

some illnesses just cant be overcome, even by the construction of a thousand cranes.