Antoku Park

 This is the burial mound in the southwest corner of the park. The leafless trees are cherry trees and, as I have previously shown, they are beautiful when in full bloom. At the moment they look rather desolate. The people you can see on the left are, apparently, a father and son. The father is teaching the son how to correctly swing a baseball bat.

The only tree in the park that has any leaves on it is this one. I guess it must be a palm of some sort.

After a fire

 Across the street from the building where  my Saturday Go Club meets, there was an wooden apartment building with four apartments. I did not notice when it happened, in spite of it being only a kilometer or so from my apartment, but the entire top story burned. The walls are still intact but you can see that part of the roof is missing and some of the windows are damaged.

Here is another view that shows that the surface of the roof is gone. It is hard to see in the pictures but there is a yellow tape stretched around the fence and there are red signs saying that the building is dangerous and has been condemned. It is going to be interesting to see how long it takes to tear it down. Once that is done I expect that they will either turn it into a pay-by-the-month parking lot or build a new building on it. There is also the possibility that it will just stay an empty lot until the owner can sell it.

Something fishy going on

 I was on my way to my Go Club which meets just a couple of hundred meters down this road. I have walked by here many times and wondered why this section of the small canal has a net over it. It is hard to see in this picture but it is there. I was a bit early so I stopped to make a more careful examination.

To my surprise, a very large carp swam out from under the cover at the end and came right up to where I was standing. Soon there were around a half dozen of them swimming around. All the same grayish color as this one. From the way that they were paying careful attention to me, I decided that it must be about their dinner time. I imaging that the owner comes everyday at about this time and gives them food. The net is there obviously to keep the kids from fishing and the adults from bringing a net and scooping them up. Even there rather plain colored fish are quite valuable here.

How to pack ten eggs

The traditional packaging in Japan is quite different. This is not traditional but it is similar in many ways. Here ten eggs are placed in a plastic dish and the entire thing is then covered with a plastic net that is pulled tight and tied at the top, leaving a loop so that it can be easily carried.

The table in the picture is our dining table. It is a kotatsu. It has a heater underneath and there is a blanket under the table top, between it and the frame. However, this one is unusual. It has chairs and is the normal height for a table. The image of a kotatsu is a very low table with short legs where the person sits on a cushion on the floor. I've never been comfortable while sitting at a regular kotatsu. I do not bend in the right places, so we have not had one for years. However, when shopping for furniture for our new apartment we found this. It is a good place to sit and read at night. It keeps your feet nice and warm, and if you are the only one in the room, you can usually turn off the air conditioner.