Near the Naka River

 I walked by the flock of resting pigeons. The very kindly posed while I took their pictures.

 At this time of year the Naka River has very little water. However, two summers ago it flooded and caused a lot of damage. This is the reason for the huge amount of work they are doing to reinforce the banks and to put in some new flood control dams. By the way, you will often see this river referred to as the Nakagawa River, but gawa or kawa is the Japanese for river so Nakagawa River means the Naka River River.

Many years ago when I was doing geography studies in Southeast Asia, most of the river names on my maps were very long. After some investigation, I found that most of the river names were one or at most two syllables long. The remainders of the long names were simply the repetition of river in the languages of the people who has successively controlled the area along that river.

This fancy entrance with the columns is nothing more than the entrance to an apartment building.