Extras To Read All About: Japan 2025!
Image from the archives of Amanda Joseph. Thanks, Manda!
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This is where I put stuff that is not going to be in an actual blog post. It’s the extras, the side-bars, the things I write sometimes with no idea where they will actually go. It’s the wild rest of Where No Mangoes.
Here’s an example.
I found sugar-encased fruit on a stick here in Kyoto! I first encountered this culinary wonder in Seoul, South Korea. I have not tried Japanese fruit on a stick yet, but I now have located a source. I shall continue to investigate.
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Now I really do have some good Extras to share.
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Like: There are beautiful hydrangeas everywhere!
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It is very hot and humid here now, but I thought you’d like to know how local people deal with the somewhat oppressive summertime weather: a stylish parasol! And loose baggy clothes, and comfortable shoes.
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Many houses in Japan have small shrines outside them. This is a Buddhist shrine, and the symbol at the bottom is Buddhist, a left-facing swastika (that word comes from Sanskrit) called a “manji” in Japan. The manji is a symbol of the Buddha’s footsteps and shows up in Buddhist art and architecture. The same symbol is also used in Hinduism, with several sacred associations. (The Nazis, appropriating the symbol, tilted theirs 45 degrees.)
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This is the signage outside a beauty salon I passed by one day, and I would totally trust my hair to an establishment with such a wonderful sense of style. A multicolor painted giraffe conveys pure loveliness.
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This Most-Wanted poster is in my apartment building lobby! These are all very dangerous criminals, and someone thinks there is enough of a chance that I am going to run into one of them that they actually posted this near our mailboxes. If one of them actually shows up in my lobby and stands still so I can compare him to this poster, I will most definitely be ratting him out to the police.
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It says a lot about global late capitalism that you can probably figure out exactly what is in this box in your apartment in Kyoto without having to translate a single word.
(Guesses welcome in the Comments, below, where I will eventually add the answer.)
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I saw both of these incredible bicycles on the same day, on my way home from visiting a temple garden in central Kyoto. I have never seen anything like them. Each is actually my size, but I bet they are each very distinctive to ride.
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At my very first Japanese class here in Kyoto, the teacher wanted us to discuss “hobbies” so she shared that one of hers is going to the cinema, and she’d just seen the newest Mission Impossible blockbuster, because she loves Tom Cruise. I mean, absolutely loves him. So we spent a wonderfully fun large chunk of class discussing Tom Cruise in Japanese, and we each got to take home a movie poster.
I plan to see the film, as my younger brother Dan talked me into watching the previous one on an airplane, and it was actually rather fun, and this is billed as the second part of that film. The cinema lists a 3-hour time slot for the movie showing, so maybe there are a whole bunch of ads and previews. I am also really looking forward to finding out what cinema snacks are in Japan.
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In the center of Kyoto there is a hotel with a tower sticking out of the top of the building. One can go up to the top. I am not sure how I feel about this building. But I may decide to go up to the top.
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So the point of this terribly murky bus stop photo is to illustrate a really very cool discovery: the bus stops have lights with motion sensors, so when you arrive to stand there in the dark awaiting the number 5 bus after your evening Japanese class, a nice friendly light clicks on so you can read the schedule and be seen by the bus driver.
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I have resolved to keep an open mind about the many new culinary opportunities here in Japan.
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This made me laugh, because as the bus swung this way I thought it was called the Hotel new Hanky.
Actually it’s the Hotel new Hankyu, which is the name of a railway line. But for a moment it was really hilarious.
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I am adding this to my collection of Skinniest Buildings I Have Ever Seen.
This one has a single small apartment on each floor.
There are balconies. I highly approve.
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As I have now been here over a month, I feel qualified to start making official improvement recommendations for the entire city of Kyoto.
First: the stores need to ditch these 7-foot-tall Northern-European-looking mannequins on all the shop floors. No one in Japan looks like this. Okay, maybe a few occasional towering tourists from Sweden, but I can assure you that none of them came here to Japan to shop for clothing because there will be absolutely nothing here in their size. Meanwhile, these excessive mannequins loom over everyone in the department store by at least a foot and a half.
And next: Upgrades on every single playground here. They are all in awful shape, and I am not kidding about this: old metal slides that sizzle to 150F on a summer day, absolutely no shade, no place for the grown-ups to sit, maybe an old swingset, and some old tires buried half-way in the ground. They are abominable. Now, I am admittedly a few years out from needing to put “playground visit” on my daily list, but I really feel for the parents here.
My initial research indicates that the local economy lacks funds for repairs and upgrades.
But today I shared a desk in Japanese class with a man from Australia (his wife is Japanese) who is planning to start a consulting business here in Japan after he winds down working in urban planning remotely for the city of Brisbane. So I pitched him my concept: start an affordable playground upgrade business with recycled materials used for safe groundcovers and new equipment. And I pointed out the endless free publicity built into a succession of official openings and dedication ceremonies for each new playground, which would be photographed and recorded glowingly in the local papers and news. I think I clinched it when I said that he and his colleagues would become heroes to an entire generation of kids and their grown-ups!
I will of course let you know about the next pressing problem I manage to solve here. One does strive to be a force for good in the community.
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It is 10 August 25, and I am back with more Extras.
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In case you were wondering what pigeons look like in Japan.
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This office is near where I work in Kyoto and I have absolutely no clue what they do there.
[Edited to add that my younger brother Dan did some snooping online and discovered that this is a cleaning firm which provides cleaners. I contend this is not obvious from the signage, but appreciate Dan’s top-notch detective skills nonetheless.]
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I am still on my campaign to highlight the inappropriateness of the 7-foot-tall, non-Japanese, professional-basketball-player-sized mannequins on department store clothing floors. They are a towering abomination. They must go soon. I made my most disapproving faces at the ones I encountered most recently.
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I felt I needed some new motivation for my Katakana Japanese alphabet studies, so I have decided to translate the Japanese Baskin-Robbins ice cream menu. To serve humanity! And at least I will know what to order.
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This is a gate to a temple, and it was just down a driveway off a big boulevard. Like, this is not a destination. It’s just here.
Stunning.
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I’ve now moved to a new apartment in a different neighborhood. I took this last photo from my old balcony the day I left, so I could share a rice paddy update. It is still too early to harvest, but the rice plants are rich emerald green now, and quite dense.
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Occasionally I stumble across things in Japan that I classify as Completely Inexplicable. As in:”I do not get this at all and probably never will.” Which of course is fine. I am constantly learning new things about all that comprises life’s rich tapestry.
So there is a universal thing here in Japan about these little decorative objects that you can attach to your backpack, purse, briefcase, bike, and so on. They can be absolutely anything: pictures of your favorite celebrity, or little toys, or mascots for something, or sports team logos, or whatever. They are popular with little kids on up to grandmas. It seems to be the culture of the dangling tchotchke, which is a Yiddish word pronounced somewhere in the vicinity of “chotchkeh” or “chatchkey” depending on which part of Lithuania your people originally came from, and it means ornament or trinket.
I did not have to wonder long where everybody here was buying their dangling tchotchkes, because the dangling tchotchke dispenser machines are everywhere, banks and banks of them outside discount stores and supermarkets, inside discount stores and supermarkets, in stations, just everywhere.
I have not paid much attention to them, except occasionally to note that one can get tiny replicas of foods, or pouffy little pastel puffballs, or weeny race cars. You put your coins into the dispenser machine and receive a plastic bubble containing your new thing to dangle from wherever. Eight-year-old me would have been totally into this.
But this one did make me come to a sharpish halt.
I can sort of get the allure of lizards. Some people are very into lizards, and this is fine. But this is not a rubbery dangling tchotchke of a regular old lizard. It is a rubbery dangling tchotchke of a MOLTING lizard, a molting Leopard Gecko to be exact.
Oh, the explosions in my brain. Are multiple life stages of the Leopard Gecko available as rubbery dangling tchotchkes? Can you go from baby (all big eyes!) to adolescent to senile? Why exactly would one seek out the molting stage of a lizard in rubbery form to dangle anywhere?
“I do not get this at all and probably never will.”
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Wall art in my new neighborhood. Doorway included for scale. Yes, this is a cat!
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There are lanterns everywhere in Japan. It’s like the IKEA paper lantern aisle, which I happen to love, if it were an entire country. So I have been hunting for the biggest lantern I could find, and I think I have found it.
This is a very beautiful nearby Buddhist temple, and I actually managed to get a picture with a person in it for scale:
This lantern is the size of a hot-air balloon.
And in my opinion perfect for the hygge fika living room. (You will have to look that up if you don’t speak IKEA.)
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In early July I biffed over to Kraków, Poland for a 5-day humor / comedy / satire conference, flying by way of Helsinki, Finland. The Finnair cabin crew gave us each one of these certificates before we landed, because we’d gone right over the North Pole on our 13.5-hour flight.
Which I thought was pretty gosh-darned neat.
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Someday I won’t need my translation app when I go to buy snacks.
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Yes, will most definitely park.
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And that concludes our Extras for today.
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One is back with more Extras on 24 August 2025:
Starting with this excellent urban crow who hopped so close this morning he nearly stood on my feet. This is a Japanese Large-Billed Crow, and since the males and females are very similar in color, size, and shape I was not sure which pronoun to use.
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It’s Lotus season! So maybe these flowers are not as ubiquitous as the world-famous springtime cherry blossoms in Japan. And, thinking about it now for the first time, to get a really good Instagrammable photograph of you and a lotus flower, you’d basically have to slink through a moat since these plants live in water. Okay, I can see how that is going to be hard to market. But what truly great flowers! I opine that the Lotus deserves an equally festive amount of attention. Lotus flowers are huge and beautiful.
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I was at the monthly Toji Temple flea market this week and it was the most gorgeous day. This picture is both market and temple.
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Kyoto is a city of bridges and canals.
What I liked about this scene: the clouds reflected in the water. And there are two herons in the picture. You have to look for them.
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And in this picture of a very nice Kyoto house you can spot the fierce figure (on the right) added to protect the dwelling!
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This is a new Kyoto mystery. I have now spotted this giraffe plate twice in very different parts of the city. I have no idea what it signifies. My only thought so far is that it is a signature of some firm or craftsperson who has done some work at the site.
Alternatively, there is a very active Japanese secret society of giraffes.
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These are my “This week’s Kyoto fashion icons!” Many Japanese people and some tourists wear traditional Japanese outfits, mainly the kimonos in the first three photos here, which are ankle-length, and the yukata in the last photo, which is less fabric and shorter. Please note the shoes! High and traditional wood-block. The top-hatted woman is the epitome of chic to me. Oddly, I saw the first three women together at a museum, and then spotted them again hours later — they were eating in a restaurant I passed by in a whole other neighborhood. But there was that distinctive top hat again.
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This is cool. Nonchalantly on an alley wall, a poster about the Gion Matsuri festival and a model of a giant festival float wheel.
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Can I just say, the Japanese have always had a really strong hat game.
These were for sale at the Toji Temple flea market.
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This was the museum show where I saw the group of women in kimonos — at an exhibit about kimonos! I was fascinated by this show; I learned about dyeing techniques, Japanese approaches to color, how a kimono is structured, different seasonal kimonos, and the origins of many traditional Japanese design elements used in textiles and elsewhere.
There were also perfectly preserved kimonos from all the way back to the mid-1700s on exhibit, with accompanying vintage woodblock-printed books of textile designs. I was astounded by the pristine quality of the garments and the books. How on earth have they been preserved so well? Back in Fulldelfia I have a fairly recently purchased moth-holed sweater with a very different tale to tell.
The Yuzen dyeing technique mentioned on that poster refers to the practice of outlining designs and patterns hand-drawn onto fabric with a type of water-based rice paste. This clever innovation allowed the colorists to then paint individual parts of the design with no color leakage and reliably fast edges. The colors are set with heat, and then the paste is washed away. The technique originated in Kyoto in the late 17th-century, created by a textile maker named Miyazaki Yuzensai.
The exhibit is excellent and loaded with examples of stunning painted and dyed textiles and crafts from several centuries. But it never explicitly explained in the English-language signage what yuzen is or means, so I slid into a corner to do some surreptitious phone-Googling, and also watched the dying demonstration film twice, and got the gist of yuzen.
And who does not love textiles? There are many museum shows on at the moment, but this was the one I most wanted to see.
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And on the topic of weather in Kyoto, this photo points out an extremely weird moment earlier today: pouring rain, a sudden heavy shower of large raindrops (blue arrow) during (yellow arrow) brilliant sunshine.
I am only now realizing that I have absolutely no meteorologist friends or acquaintainces who can explain this phenomenon to me. How do I know zero meteorologists? Somehow I have lived my entire life wrong.
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I will conclude here with something truly nuts. This is the text in the plastic bubble that came with a toy from a machine. It is a string of nonsense.
I got it when I was on the hunt for the Molting Leopard Gecko toy (scroll way up; all is explained above) because Susan Messina, for whom I wrote the earlier post from England about Cherry Ames, Picturesque Village Nurse, has a daughter who has a gecko, and we agreed she’d really like one of those toys. (I got her two.) And I wanted to try out a machine to make sure I could successfully extract a toy, which was a good idea because the first time it ate my 50-yen coins because it only takes 100s and then I had to go get change from a machine on another floor, so I got a Lady Liberty because it is just so incredibly whacko.
The toy is one of a set of 6 posed rubber Statue of Liberty toys, the implications of which are extremely difficult to infer, even now after I have read a 2014 blog post written about them when they first came out, and watched some stop-action YouTube videos made about them coming to life and taking over a photoshoot.
The Japanese on the paper reads: “Too Free A Goddess.” That’s helpful. No, not really. So is Lady Liberty in need of freedom or is she already “too free?” It’s like the title of that famous episode of The Twilight Zone, “To Serve Man.” Is that the alien’s generous aim in visiting Earth? Or is it the name of their evil cookbook?
The only explanation I have for the existence of these things is: because bonkers.
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And with that we conclude today’s Extras to Read All About.
Come back soon for more stuff.
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Oh good, you’re back! I have more stuff.
The August Blood Moon emerges dramatically from behind a bank of obscuring clouds!
And I finally stop complaining and take my photo already.
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If you walk past the Kyoto Zoo across the canal from it, you can see the giraffes sticking their heads over the tops of things and chewing on trees.
Even if it is the second time you have seen the giraffes this week, it is still rather amazing.
And you can see the flamingos!
Giraffes and flamingos are simply never expected.
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And here was a surprising event: a Sunday vintage car and motorcycle show and swap meet in the park outside the Heian Jingu Shrine.
This turned out to be very Americana, with some American muscle cars and very old bulky Chevys, a few very-lifted pickup trucks, and some extremely chopped Harley Davidson motorcycles on display. There was a wonderful vintage Honda 125 motorcycle from 1965, and I had a long chat about vintage motorcycles with the guy at that tent, and at the end he insisted I accept a gift (a cartoony sticker about engines) because he was so surprised I knew so much about vintage motorcycles. Which was nice. One rarely gets tangibly rewarded for being a motorcycle bore. Next time you see me in person, make sure you are sitting very comfortably, and then ask me how I knew the choppers on display were all originally Harleys from the angle of their V-twin engine cylinders…
There was a lot of fashion on offer, if your dream outfit is head-to-toe American car mechanic.
There were vintage toys, a bunch of possibly stolen metal American traffic signs, and some stuff from Hawaii. And hundreds, if not thousands, of boxed Hot Wheels mini model cars! Did you give all of yours away? This is where they all ended up.
Vintage Chevys the size of boats! And that concludes today’s Extras.
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Where No Mangoes 
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