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It’s time for Philadelphia’s annual cherry blossom festival again! If you don’t know about it, you should visit http://jasgp.org/cherryblossomfestival and look at the schedule of events. There are so many different events that if you have any interest in Japan at all, you will find something to your liking.

The best event of all is Sakura Sunday, a free festival in Fairmount Park underneath all the blossoming cherry trees. There’s food, music, dancing, shopping, and a general atmosphere of fun. Plus, you can buy prints from my 100 Famous Views of Philadelphia series there!

So if you’re anywhere near Phildelphia, don’t miss it this year!

It’s been a long time since I posted anything about my regular life. I guess some time ago I thought I wanted to focus more on art posting. It worked great when I was doing daily or semi-daily paintings, but now that I’m much busier and juggling more and bigger projects, all that’s happened is I’m posting less often. So here’s a non-art post.

Last weekend my wife and I took a trip to Osaka. We had gotten some gift money from her aunt for travel and it’s really our first travel since we got married, so it was a pretty big deal. We also happened to have 2 free tickets to Universal Studios Japan that expire at the end of March, so Osaka was the natural choice. On Saturday we spent the day at USJ, and having already been there (and as it’s exactly the same as Universal Studios in the States), we didn’t care about the rides and just wanted to enjoy the atmosphere. That was a pretty good plan, considering how crowded it was. Most of the rides had 2 to 3 hour long lines. Can you imagine if this had been summertime? Yikes! So we mostly walked around, enjoying the fake buildings.

USJ

I have this things about Universal Studios — the one “ride” I always end up seeing, every time, is the Waterworld show. This isn’t because I particularly love the show (though I do happen to think it’s probably the best thing to see there), but because every time my walking route takes me to that part of the park, the show is always starting in about 3 minutes, so I take the opportunity. This time was no different.

So we went to Waterworld. One thing I always notice at the shows is the birds flying around chaotically and confusedly as booming music, concussive blasts, and jets of hot fire blast around the stadiums. Why on earth do these birds nest here?? Surely this show happening 7 times or whatever per day must drive them away! But then I remembered there’s 500 people below with Elmo-shaped boxes full of caramel corn! A veritable smörgåsbord! I admire those pigeons for putting up with our crap just to eat our trash.

Waterworld

The Waterworld show was cut short, presumably by an injury, though it was hard to see from where we were sitting. There wasn’t any gore, just the speakers went static-y and the actors all walked straight off the stage like robots or hypnotized cult members. It was really surreal to see the Deacon cut off mid-sentence, mid-punch, and then, still holding the heroine’s hair, the both of them walk cordially together off stage. But considering the dangerous nature of that kind of stunt show the coordination is necessary I’m sure. And impressive. Even one sound cue being off could mean a serious injury.

We walked around for the rest of the day, and we managed to get some fast pass tickets as compensation for the actor’s injury which resulted in our free stunt show being cut short (the Japanese audience left the theater in an organized fashion without a complaint, something which blew my mind in when I thought about what would have happened if it were the US). With our fast pass tickets we got to do Back to the Future and Backdraft (arguably the worst amusement park ride ever) and enjoyed making fun of them both. The live music shows were predictably awful and creepy, with lip-syncing dancers and strange English words. There was one really impressive one called “King of Pop” which was basically a 4-person Michael Jackson singing and dancing medley. We thought it would be pretty awful, especially considering he’s been dead less than a whole year, but it was pretty fun and drew a big crowd. Finally, we thought we would stand in the 3 hour long line to see the brand new attraction: “Space Fantasy: The Ride.”

As we stood in line for longer than the duration of Avatar, I noticed that all the kids and mothers were napping on against the walls, or playing games, or exploring the park by themselves while their husbands had stand in the line. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for them, being that it’s likely they paid for the tickets, they drove the car and paid the extortionate Japanese highway fees, they bought the $30 hamburgers for lunch, and they were probably handing over their wallets to the family who had free reign of the park while they held the spot in line. And I noticed all the young couples standing next to each other in line, each one playing a different game on their cell phones and never saying a word to each other. I guess I find some solace in knowing that Japanese, while different from Americans in many ways, are still just as screwed up as we are.

Finally we got through the 3 hour line, enjoying the people watching as much as any attraction, and it actually turned out to be a really great ride! Because it was built in the lot the formerly housed E.T.: The Ride I had the lowest possible expectations for it, and because the line was so nondescript that I had no idea what kind of ride this was going to be, but it was very fun! (I say the line was nondescript, but you really have to see USJ to know just how nondescript that really is. For example, the Spider Man ride is entirely the same as the US Spider Man ride, except that in the US version, they painted all of the props in the line area, so it feels like you’re walking through a cartoon news room while you’re waiting for the ride — quite fun — and in the Japanese version, they didn’t paint it so you’re walking through a room full of unidentifiable green plastic props. As for Space Fantasy: The Ride, we queued up and navigated around an empty warehouse with no decoration at all for 2 hours and 59 minutes, and then finally entered the ride itself, where we sprinted through about 1 kilometer of incredibly interesting, detailed, storytelling construction with no time to actually see what was going on. Why?? Because it’s Japan.)

Dinner was the Hard Rock Cafe, which, while ridiculously expensive in the US, is the best place to get “authentic” American food in Japan. Somehow they’ve managed to preserve the time-honored secrets of American cuisine so that the taste you get there is exactly the same as Hard Rock in the US. That means I can have nachos and fajitas without feeling sad. In the other hand, it means I have to drink Budweiser.

After USJ we stayed in a tiny little hotel Namba, which is really a ghost town. It was the cheapest hotel we could find — not quite up to the level of the Happiness Hotel from The Muppets Take Manhattan. But that’s part of the fun!

The next day we went early in the morning to Osaka castle — a place which I’d been dying to see since I came. I’ve been here for almost 3 years now and I’d seen as many castles… a travesty really. If I’d had any free time when I worked at AEON I would have tried to see every castle in the country, and now that I have free time I can’t afford to travel. But Osaka castle was absolutely beautiful — on the outside anyway. The inside is like Nagoya castle, just a museum, and totally uninteresting compared to a restored castle interior like Himeji or Kanazawa castle. Plus it costs 800 yen to enter and the line was super long, so we opted not to go inside (the exhibit was some collection of shipwreck artifacts from the ancient Mediterranean — about as non-Japanese castle-like as something can be). But outside was a scene far better than any museum! The whole castle grounds (which are bigger than my home town of Collingswood) were covered in just-blooming cherry trees and people having hanami parties, barbecues, singing songs, playing sports, music, you name it. There were professional street entertainers everywhere (very Osaka!) and even a performing monkey! This was one of the big highlights — not just because I love monkeys, but because this was the very first monkey I’ve seen in Japan! (Another travesty I can blame on having absolutely no free time at my previous job…) The birds in the castle area are so used to people that they jump right up on to your hands or shoulders to be fed — sparrows, pigeons and crows — and there were people walking disgusting little chihuahuas which were wearing more accessories than an 80′s glam band. The entire scenario felt like a Disney movie come to life — except not creepily evil like Disney.

Yamato the awesome monkey

We walked around for the rest of the day, and visited the Umeda Sky building which has a basement level Showa-era street. I’d been wanting to visit here since I first heard of that, and finally going was really fun. It’s like a mini renaissance faire, with pre-war style store fronts, tiny little trucks, old Asahi beer posters, and old folk music playing on crackly radios. I love walk-in dioramas, and the atmosphere down there was so great, it was like a dream.

We took the train home, worn out from so much walking. And then, just to slap us in the face after a beautiful, warm, blossom-filled weekend, it snowed AGAIN in Fukui.

I mentioned these paintings a little while ago but they’re finally dry enough now that I feel confident putting them on my scanner. These three landscapes were done of places around me in Japan where we took my family after they came to Japan for our wedding — the famous Todaiji down in Nara, the not-so-famous Mt. Hino in Fukui prefecture, and the even less famous teahouse Yokokan in Fukui city.

Yokokan, Fukui

I love this teahouse. It was burned down in the World War 2 firebombing of Fukui, but rebuilt in the 80′s when the foundations were discovered underneath a road. It’s in such a beautiful neighborhood, and it is one of the most tranquil places in Fukui prefecture. If you ever come to Fukui, you should go there.

Mt. Hino, Echizen

Also known as “the Mt. Fuji of Echizen province” (by I-don’t-know-who), Mt. Hino is a huge mountain that towers above Echizen and is always beautiful. If you’ve been reading my blog since I lived in Takefu, you’ll know that I’ve loved Mt. Hino since I first saw it. So this is one of my favorite views of the mountain, from the Hino river.

Todaiji, Nara

Todaiji is probably the most famous landmark in Nara. It’s an enormous wooden temple which houses an enormous seated Buddha. The park by Todaiji is famous for its tame deer which will walk right up to you and bite you over and over until you throw food on the ground and run away while they’re distracted.

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve had any update here, and I’m sorry for that. I’ve been working pretty hard, and besides working not much particularly notable has happened recently, so I haven’t really taken the time to write anything. I’ve been doing my taxes — Japanese and American — and teaching a bunch of English classes to save up money, and studying Japanese as well, because I really want to pass level 2 of the JLPT this summer.

But I have been painting! I’ve been working hard on 3 landscape oils, which are almost dry but still tacky enough that I don’t want to place them on my scanner. (I’ve still got some green smudges on my scanner backdrop from the last time I scanned something too early.)

Today’s post is a piece I’ve had in my mind for some time now. As you may know, there are two dinosaurs named for Fukui prefecture: fukuiraptor and fukuisaurus. They’re fairly unremarkable dinosaurs, but I like them a lot. I was impressed by their displays at the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum, and I’m fairly certain that’s the only place in the world you can really see them. Last year they finally began selling little toy fukuiraptors and fukuisauruses, so I bought them both.

Well, besides just liking them, one of the top keywords that leads people to my website is “fukuiraptor.” I have no idea why — I think I only briefly mentioned fukuiraptor in a post a long time ago. Yet it remains among the top search terms, after my own name. So I’ve always thought maybe I should paint a fukuiraptor just to satisfy all these searchers who come here looking for it. And being that Fukui is big on dinosaurs, and Japan is big on trains, I thought that I should do a series on dinosaurs riding trains. So here is my first one: Fukui Raptor at Takefu-shin Station.

Fukuiraptor at Takefu-shin Station (Click for a larger version.)