WW2 Strikes Again

Debris from the explosion at Miyazaki Airport (The Asahi Shimbun/Getty)

Aljazeera reports: Suspected WWII bomb grounds Japanese airport

Apparently it had gotten tired of being ignored and decided to make its presence known. Creepy / scary.

I just posted about old WW2 bombs still being found in Germany.

Miss Sherlock - Max series

MISS SHERLOCK Official Trailer (HD) Japanese HBO Series
JoBlo Streaming & TV

An entertaining version of Holmes & Watson done with Japanese women in the title roles. Sherlock is a nickname she picked up somewhere along the way, and Watson is Wata-San. Complicated plots that they rush through in 45 minutes. It's impressive how much they can cram into one of these shows. Numerous characters, and most of the characters are characters, if you know what I mean. Not quite sure how to define 'character' as in 'Joe is quite a character'. That can mean almost anything. Now that I think about it, I think it means there is something unusual about this person, or maybe the person is worth noting, either because the unusual thing is either very unusual or impressive.

Anyway, lots of characterly characters, complicated plots and obscure scientific details. Sherlock also suspects there is someone behind all these crimes she is investigating although we haven't seen any evidence of such a master mind, but we've only seen two episodes so far. But you know what I'm thinking? Moriarty, that's what I'm thinking. He's going to show up pretty soon and he will be a pain in Sherlock's side forever more. Given we've got girls in the title roles, I suspect Moriarty will be a girl also.

Kyoto

Spring in Kyoto, Japan

Airliner at Night

Boeing Airliner at Osaka by Muroi

Muroi is has taken a number of similar photos. Very colorful, very space-agie.

VIVANT

『VIVANT』キャスト最新ビジュアル公開！遂に､本当の冒険物語が幕を開ける―第3話 7/30(日)よる9時【TBS】
TBS公式 YouTuboo

VIVANT is a goofball action comedy. A Japanese corporation makes an error in transferring funds to the fictional country of Balka. Nogi, the salaryman who pressed the Enter key that activated the transfer, gets blamed for the error and is sent to Balka to retrieve the missing $90 million. Balka is somewhere in central Asia, between China, Russia, Mongolia and Kazakhstan. The scenery is spectacular. Nogi bumbles along and survives only because other people look out for him. Nogi's facial expressions are very entertaining. Nobody knows what VIVANT means, the best they have been to work out so far is that it might be a mispronunciation of the Japanese word for annex. 10 episodes, an hour and a half each. We've only watched the first one.

Two days later and we've watched 8 of the 10 episodes and they're mostly like 45 minutes long. I think only the first episode was extra long. Anyway, this show is a real smorgasbord. We've got heart warming scenes, that go on for so long I was beginning to think this was a soap opera. We have scenes of brutal violence, and deliberate cruelty. We have cynical conspiracy mongering or stunning expose of what is actually going on in the world, depending if you are wearing a tin foil hat or not. And then there's the day-to-day activities going on in civilian spaces where everyone is pretending to be nice people. My gawd, it's just like real life. Scary if you think about it.

Osaka

Street scene in Osaka, Japan by Masahiro Miyagi
Click to embiggenate

The Outsider | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix

Watched this last night when I couldn't sleep. It's kind of an understated Japanese gangster movie. Set in 1954, it opens with an American in a Japanese prison with a bunch of Yakuza. He helps one guy out and that gets him out of prison and into a job working for the gang. There is very little dialog and no explanation of how we got here. I don't think Jared utters more than a couple dozen lines. The atmosphere is a little tense. Things are mostly quiet but occasionally we get brief bits of violence, but those come out of the blue. Two guys will be having a discussion and then boom, one of them is dead. I can only attribute this to the Japanese being inscrutable. Someone more in tune with Yakuza sensibilities might be able to make some sense of these incidents.

Changing Weather

Castles in the Clouds, weather division: In today’s weather forecast, the computer-generated model shows a giant storm off Japan – shaped like Japan.

Storm map from Yard Sale of the Mind who also has some comments on G. K. Chesterton's brother Cecil (G. K. had a brother? Who knew?) and change.

Bullet Train - Netflix Movie

BULLET TRAIN - Official Trailer (HD)
Sony Pictures Entertainment
Very silly, very violent, and pretty funny. The head (the White Death) of the biggest criminal organization in Japan hires a couple of well dressed thugs (Lemon and Tangerine) to bring his wayward son and a briefcase filled with $20 million dollars to Kyoto via the bullet train. To start with (in Tokyo I presume), there are several other passengers on the train, but as time goes by they disappear until there is no one left but our handful of troublemakers.

One guy is there to steal the briefcase (Brad Pitt), one girl (the Hornet) has been hired to kill someone, I'm not sure who, one girl is there to exact revenge on her father (the White Death), one guy is there to exact revenge on the girl, and another guy is there to exact revenge on the person responsible for his wife's death. He thinks it's Brad, but it's actually the Hornet.

Through it all Brad it talking (via cell phone) about his new philosophy of life with his handler (Sandra Bullock). It must be very frustrating for a man who is looking for inner peace to be compelled to violent action to defend himself.

As you might expect, there is a spectacular train crash at the end.

Train to Heaven

“A Steam Locomotive Bound for Heaven, from Journeys through Heaven and Hell” (1872) by Kawanabe Kyosai. Courtesy Seikado Bunko Art Museum

Via Flares Into Darkness

Resonance

How Suzuki stole communist technology to make their motorcycles faster
bart
Great stuff.

YouTube blurb:

This is the incredible story of Water Kaaden and his innovative 2 stroke racebikes with MZ. Its also the story of one Ernst Degner and how he stole Kaaden's tech for Suzuki's race team. 

 

Fairlady Z

The Nissan 240Z changed the reputation of a whole country | Revelations with Jason Cammisa | Ep. 24
Hagerty
I enjoy Jason's stories. He paints a clear picture of the recent history of the automobile industry without getting bogged down in minutiae. It might not be entirely accurate, history, after all, is written by the victors, but it's good enough for me. He also explains a lot of stuff that was fairly obscure, like why the Skyline developed such a cult following.

Live streaming of Onoden ch

オノデンch のライブ配信

Live stream from downtown Tokyo. We're here because Detroit Steve sent me a link to an interactive 3D map of Tokyo. I think it's mostly for transit. It shows trains and there are cameras all over the place. This is just the view from one of the cameras. I suppose it could be useful for commuters. 

This is another example of people offloading unwanted information onto their smartphones and the great benevolent internet cloud. You could worry that if the cloud collapses, you won't be able to find your way home, but if the cloud collapses, the trains probably won't be running either, so walk to the nearest bar and have a drink because the end of the world is nigh.

Hot Scooters

2011.10.30イワイ　ＳＳ1/32
tomy12angel24
Making the most of what you've got. Modified Japanese scooters timed drag race over 1/32 of a mile which is 50 meters. I guess that makes sense in a tiny country. I wondered why the riders were sitting so far forward on their seats, I'm thinking these things don't have that much power and then I saw the third guy pulling a wheely. Okay then. This video is from 2011 but it still seems to be going strong.

Japan

The Wife of Watanabe – image from Yoshitoshi.net

Humans are blood thirsty. Page about Yoshitoshi.

Rurouni Kenshin: The Final

Kenshin Takes on Enemy Territory Alone ⚔️ | Rurouni Kenshin: The Final | Netflix
Netflix Philippines
A semi-silly conclusion to the series. Like I said before, it's basically John Wick 2 with swords. Endless supplies of bad guys who get knocked down and beat up in these massive sword fights where hardly anyone ever gets cut. Kind of weird. It's kind of like 'if we just put a bunch guys wailing on each other on the screen, it'll be an entertaining scene'. Anyway, there's a bunch of that, a handful of very nasty villains, a goodly bunch of over the top stunts, and, oh yeah, a couple of cute girls.

Netflix 2+ hours

Toshiba In Trouble?

Toshiba Worldwide Presence

Who knew? Certainly not me. I've owned several Toshiba products and they served me well for many years. The only Toshiba device I have now is a Chromebook. ZeroHedge reports:

Most Americans probably remember Toshiba for the DVD players, TVs and other consumer electronics it once produced and sold in droves. But in more recent decades, the company has been badly mismanaged. It was forced to sell off its once-prized chips business in 2018 to offset losses generated by a disastrous foray into the nuclear power business. Then, back in June, Osamu Nagayama, the chairman of its board, was ousted in a rare vote by shareholders to oust the chairman of a major Japanese firm in the wake of an accounting fraud scandal. In Japan, taking out board members and management in such a brusque style simply isn't done.

Now, the board is at a cross-roads. It's in the final stages of a strategic review demanded by above-mentioned "wolfpack". They're pressuring the company to agree to set of measures that would beef up the stock price (selling assets, funding buybacks). According to the FT, activist and special events funds are "camped out in Toshiba's shareholder register in the expectation that investors can force the company into a strategy that would significantly raise its share price."

Rurouni Kenshin: The Beginning

RUROUNI KENSHIN: THE BEGINNING – Official Main Trailer
ワーナー ブラザース 公式チャンネル

In the late 1860s Japan there was a civil war being fought between the Shogunate (the Samurai) and the Emperor.

This movie is a live action adaptation of the anime movie series, which is nominally based on the life of a real-life samurai from this time period.

It's basically John Wick 2 with a sword. Entertaining with good production values. There might be a story in there somewhere, and there is an attractive, enigmatic girl. 

The film is a prequel to the [four] other Rurouni Kenshin films . . . It focuses on Kenshin's past as the assassin Hitokiri Battōsai during the final years of the Bakumatsu  . . .  - Wikipedia

The Last Samurai (starring Tom Cruise) was set in the same era.

Nobuo Fujita

Nobuo Fujita

Almost Chosen People has a fine story about the time that Nobuo Fujita tried to set fire to the forests outside Brookings, Oregon. This was back during WW2 and Nobuo was flying an airplane, an airplane launched from a submarine. Wait a minute, didn't I post something about this submarine once before? 

I did, though it was the I-400, a successor to the I-25. Both were huge. The I-25 was 350 feet long, the I-400 was 400 feet long.

Brookings (Google Map) is on the coast just about five miles from the California border.

Via Head Noises

Japanese battleship Ise

Ise was Hyuga's Sister by Standish Backus, 1946
Wreck of the Japanese battleship-carrier Ise, Kure, Japan

Ise was launched in 1917 and survived until the very end of WW2. She always seemed to play a background role, never the lead. She did have some luck:

The division sailed from Singapore on 10 February [1945] and was spotted by the British submarine HMS Tantalus the following day. It was forced to submerge by a maritime patrol aircraft and was unable to attack. On 13 February the submarine USS Bergall unsuccessfully attacked the ships as did the submarine USS Blower. One of Ise's AA guns caused one of Blower's torpedoes to detonate prematurely. Later that afternoon, Oyodo launched one of her floatplanes which spotted the submarine USS Bashaw on the surface about 22 km (13.7 miles) ahead of the convoy. Hyūga opened fire with her main guns and forced Bashaw to submerge when one of her shells landed within 1.6 km (1 mile) of the submarine. The convoy reached the Matsu Islands, off the Chinese coast, on the 15th and was unsuccessfully attacked by the submarine USS Rasher before they reached Zhoushan Island, near Shanghai that night. The convoy reached Kure on 20 February, having evaded or escaped pursuit by 23 Allied submarines along the way. - Wikipedia

 Via The Scratching Post