Looking Back: 5 – old enough to buy a car

USS Hoist ARS-40

     After only four months on the USS Pawcatuck I got transferred to my second ship, the USS Hoist ARS-40 in March, 1960. Like the Pawcatuck, the Hoist was home-ported in Norfolk. The Hoist was a salvage and rescue vessel that was adapted or modified to come to the rescue of sunken submarines, presumably with living survivors trapped on the ocean floor. Part of the crew were qualified deep sea divers as well as skilled SKUBA divers. The ship also had a decompression chamber designed to relieve people with the bends (a condition arising from dissolved gases coming out of solution into bubbles inside the body due to too rapid depressurization). In other words, if a man rescued from a sunken submarine, say, rises to the surface too quickly the too rapid depressurization causes bubbles to form in the body causing severe pain and possible death. In such a case, the man would be put into the decompression chamber and re-pressurized more slowly until his body was readjusted to normal surface atmospheric pressure. 

      I had turned 18 in December, felt confined by the Norfolk scene without wheels and decided to buy a car, my first. It was a 1955 Ford, just like the one in the photo on the right. Having a car was enormously liberating. Away from Norfolk, in civilian clothes, you could be yourself, whereas in the Norfolk area, even in civilian clothes people seemed to know you were a sailor and treated or shunned or exploited you accordingly. Sad to say, but there was little respect or honor for “our finest”, our boys in uniform, at least not in the Norfolk area where sailors were concerned. It wasn't unusual for us to travel as far as, say, Ohio, to a shipboard buddies hometown and be fixed up with local girls (non professionals) for a weekend. Driving half the night to get there and half the night to get back, staggering and bleary-eyed and back in uniform, aboard ship for Monday morning muster. But it was worth it to get out of Nofuck Virginia.

mushroom cloud over NYC (composite idea)

      We were in the midst of the Cold War and paranoia vis-a-vis the Soviet Union seemed, in retrospect, to be building towards the brinkmanship that was the Cuban Missile Crisis, still a couple years down the pike. There was concern that Soviet subs could easily reach the eastern seaboard of the United States and an early warning system seemed absolutely essential to prevent Manhattan from going up in a mushroom cloud. To this end a kind of wall of sound detection was laid on the ocean floor off shore from the US East Coast. These were a series of sonar submarine sound detection modules known as SOSUS a Sound Surveillance System. For several months the Hoist was engaged in laying these sonar modules on the ocean floor and we were berthed in Hamilton, Bermuda for the duration. 

Photo credit: http://www.corbisimages.com/stock-photo/rights-managed/BE058429/mushroom-cloud-over-nyc-composite-idea

To be continued....

Most Evil Corporation of the Year Award

Most Evil Corporation of the Year Award - 2012

I'm working at a Black Company

      Probably everyone knows about “BLACK OPS”, but have you heard about “BLACK CORPS”?

       It's the little known underbelly of corporate Japan where companies that exploit their labor force have mushroomed since the halcyon days of the lifetime employment system—the vaunted cradle to grave security offered to Japanese salarymen in the heady days of Japan's post-war recovery and economic development. Then the bubble burst leading to now going on 20 years of economic stagnation and a fractured labor market where a significant portion of a whole generation is being forced into part time, low pay, no benefits jobs. 

       This lost generation of young people are called フリーターFREETAs (involuntarily in part time jobs) and NEETs (not in education or employment or training). The nuance of these appellations is something that is undesirable. A large segment of a whole generation is adrift in a working world that has little use for them; they are as dispensable as paper diapers, scraping a living on the margins of the business world, sleeping in cheap coffin hotels or cubicles in all-night Internet cafes that don't ask too many questions or living at home off the pensions of aging parents. (There have even been incidents of family members failing to report the death of a pensioner, stashing the desiccated body in the bedroom for 30 years in one case, and continuing to collect the pension.)

       Into the breach step the “black corporations”. Companies that are happy to hire people desperate for any kind of work and abuse them in near slavery conditions. Some of these are well known companies in Japan who show their best face to the public and even establish a reputation as benevolent philanthropists. There is the case of a young woman who worked for a restaurant chain whose owner, Miki Watanabe, was honored by Forbes for his work building schools and orphanages in countries like Nepal and Cambodia. “In the same year as the Forbes honor, Mina Mori, a 26 year-old employee of one of his Watami restaurants committed suicide only two months into her employment. Itwas discovered that she had worked 140 hours of [unpaid] overtime in one month before her death. The incident was just recently officially declared a case of karoshi (death by overwork).” [Watami won the “Most Evil Corporation” award, by the way.]

       Her case is not unusual for people employed by black corporations. “In Japanese, the term 'black business' refers to companies who rake in huge profits while exploiting their own work force by discrimination, harassment, unpaid overtime, and short-term contracts.This type of business is a widespread problem in Japanese society but often goes undiscussed in mainstream media.”

       The issue of black corporations was brought to my attention just recently by a program on NHK television (Japan Broadcasting Company). One abused employee interviewed on the program is suing her company for abuse. She described being systematically pressured to quit after the first month of employment by her boss. He would call her into his office and verbally browbeat and abuse her for sometimes two or three hours at a time. She was smart enough to bring a tape recorder to at least one of these torture sessions to use as evidence in a court of law.

       The article on the linked website (Rocket News 24) lists the 12 most evil companies in Japan engaged in black business operations. It may come as no surprise that Tepco of Fukushima nuclear meltdown fame is on the list.

       And these are just the tip of the iceberg!

Quotes are from the linked article on the Rocket News 24 website.

Looking Back: 4 – rude awakenings

1957 (Federal troops escorting the Little Rock Nine)

   The Pawcatuck's homeport was in Norfolk, Virginia. Small town hick from the northeast that I was, I had never had any contact with other than white people before joining the Navy. My first contact with Blacks, Asians and Hispanics was at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. This was 1959, before the sit ins, civil rights marches and urban riots of the 1960s. By this time the momentum toward civil rights for Blacks was well underway after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954; Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-56; Little Rock, Arkansas school integration, 1957.

       But, in 1959 there were still remnants of the old Jim Crow Laws in the South where I saw, for the first time, blatant racism depicted in “white” and “colored” signs in rest rooms, waiting rooms, restaurants, etc. I was growing up in more ways and more quickly than I had ever anticipated back in the old all white home town.

       Norfolk was affectionately, or, more accurately, sarcastically, called Nofuck, Virginia. The nickname referred to the attitude of decent girls who shunned sailors as a general rule and B-girls in the bar strips outside the bases who led us on for overpriced drinks and disappeared when the chips were down. There was another side to the sex scene in Nofuck that I was naïvely unaware of when I first arrived and soon fell into a trap, that is, trapped in a moving car with a huge merchant marine man trying to feel me up while driving.

        Lots of sailors, yours truly included, kept “civvies”, civilian clothes off base in lockers at the YMCA in town. We would leave the base in uniform as required, change to civvies to go on liberty, and change back to go back to the base. There was a bus stop just outside the Y. I had changed back into my uniform, one day, and was waiting for a bus when this car pulls up and a big macho looking and smiling man leans out the window and offers me a ride to the base. So, I thought, hey, a ride, sure, why not, and jumped in.

       We drove along exchanging the usual what's your name and where're you from introductions. Suddenly, there is this hand tentatively brushing my knee, which I moved to the side. But, the hand returned more insistently on the knee and traveling up my thigh. I pointedly removed the hand this time and I realized the man was rather drunk. Meanwhile, we were still on the road to the base and traveling too fast to do anything but tell this insistent gentleman with his hand back on my thigh that I wasn't interested and to let me out of the car. He refused and became more insistent both verbally and with his hands, and I became more angry, unceremoniously throwing his hand off me and demanding that he keep his goddamned hand to himself and stop and let me out of this fucking car. No soap.

       Now I realized that he had no intention of taking me to the base and figured he would turn off the main road at some point and drag me to a remote area and probably beat and rape if not kill me—he was big enough. I was scared. My heart was pounding like a jackhammer and the adrenalin was singing. I managed to keep my wits and decided to watch for my chance and hope that he would have to stop for a traffic light or at least slow down enough for me to jump out of the car when he inevitably, I was sure, would turn onto a road that didn't lead to the base.

        Soon enough, that's exactly what happened. He slowed down to turn without stopping but slow enough for me to take what I calculated was my most likely one and only chance to get away. When I opened the passenger door he tried to grab and stop me but I managed to jump out losing my white hat in the car in the process. To my relief the car kept on going. When I stopped rolling I checked for physical damage. I wasn't seriously injured, just a few cuts and bruises mostly on my hands and knees and tears in my clothes, but I was considerably shaken. I sat down on the curb and pulled myself together. When I had calmed down enough, I started thumbing a ride back to the base. Before too long another sailor picked me up and asked me why I was “out of uniform”. 

       I laughed and said: “I'm lucky that's all I'm out of!”, and told him the story.

To be continued...

interlude

     Sometimes, when you wake up at 3 in the morning and your mind is like a tumble dryer in a laundromat the best thing to do is to just watch it and let the pictures and thoughts flow wherever they want to go. Maybe you've got a problem and are trying to control the thoughts in a channel you think would be helpful only to come back to square one. The restlessness and tossing and turning only get worse and the solution to the problem seems farther away than ever.

     The other night I was having one of those “nuits blanches”, a French euphemism for sleepless nights, and, in exasperation, stopped trying to shut down my feverish brain and let it wander when, unbidden, the lyrics of a favorite Dylan song started going through my mind. The song took on new meaning and seemed to be talking to me directly and I smiled to myself there in the dawn light. "Just let it go," I thought to myself.

Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

Can you guess the song?

Looking Back: 3 – bell bottom blues

      Just as I was born into a neither here nor there generation, I was also in the military between wars. The Korean War had ended in more or less a stalemate and a “peace treaty” had been signed inJuly 1953. It was the first of America's subsequent involvement in victory less wars, and tensions continued on the Korean Peninsula and elsewhere in the long Cold War. The United Nations commander in the Far East, General Mark W. Clark said at the time that he had "the unenviable distinction of being the first US Army commander to sign an armistice without victory." 

USS Pawcatuck AO-108 in refueling positi 

     I was a “dungaree Navy” sailor. All four of my ships were auxiliaries, ships that supplied the “right stuff” Navy (fighting ships like cruisers, destroyers, aircraft carriers). My four ships were in order of assignment: November 1959, USS Pawcatuck (AO-108); March 1960, USS Hoist (ARS-40); June 1961, USS Salinan (ATF-161); December 1961, USS Kaskaskia (AO-27). We were considered sort of B class sailors, the downstairs kitchen help to the upstairs nobility serving on warships. 

 

graphic of a 45º roll

      My first ship was a fleet oiler, the USS Pawcatuck AO [auxiliary oiler] 108, to which I was assigned in November, 1959 after a four-week training course in Newport, Rhode Island. People often asked me at the time if I ever got seasick. So, to put that one to rest, yes, I did get seasick on my first cruise, but that was the one and only time. I never got seasick again even in heavy seas with 30- and 40+-foot waves battering my second and much smaller ship (USS Hoist), pitching and rolling as much as 45º on the inclinometer (even hovering there just a bit too long with my nose practically in the water thinking she ain't gonna go back up). But she did!

      The experience of that storm was, oddly enough, strangely beautiful and exhilarating, with the wind shrieking in the rigging and the foaming crests of white-capped waves blowing spray high overhead; the bow of the ship plunging into the oncoming wave and the fantail hovering and dancing on the crest with her screws out of the water; the charcoal and white color of the sky and the deepest blue green water I've ever seen—except in the ship's wake where the color seemed a blend of jade and turquoise of an intense hue dappled with white foam that almost hurt your eyes with its brilliance.

      I was a Quartermaster, trained in Newport in celestial and electronic navigation and updating navigation charts. I also became an expert special quarters helmsman, steering the ship in tight situations such as coming in and out of ports, fueling at sea operations where there were three ships steaming side by side quite close to each other; us in the middle, usually an aircraft carrier on one side and a string of destroyers and cruisers coming and going on the other, being refueled and re-provisioned.

refueling at sea at close quarters

      I remember one incident during fueling operations. I was at the helm of the Pawcatuck, there was a carrier on the port (left) side and the smaller destroyers were coming up on the starboard side one after the other. I must have been daydreaming because the Pawcatuck started to close the distance between us and the carrier. In other words I was drifting to port on a collision course. Suddenly, I awoke with a start, when, from the port side bridge wing, the captain yelled at me: “Boucher! What the hell are you doing in there?” Looked out the wheelhouse window: “Oh, shit!” On instinct, without another word, I spun the wheel hard to starboard to stop the drift. It isn't easy to turn a sluggish tanker with its deep draft, and it's just as difficult to stop it once it starts to turn. In such a critical situation, with ships close on either side, the timing of the opposite rudder was critical. The captain had enough sense to leave me alone until I got the Paw stabilized and on a true course once again. I guess he must have been just as relieved as I was, because he merely took me off the wheel without the ass-chewing that I was, deservedly, expecting. I could have killed a lot of people. 

 

To be continued...

SIEGERSCHAU CHINA 2012

3ra Cat Hembras, encabezada por Roberto Jr. con Ranny del Alto Pino (270 perras en pista)

El Sieger de China 2012 fue  tambien en esta ocasion el Sieger de Asia ( una especie de COAPA en ese continente).  Este Sieger fue  juzgado por Albrecht Worner, Leonhard Schweikert, Heinz Scheerer, Hans Peter Rieker, Margit Van Dorssen e Imran Hussain.

En este campeonato  se batieron todos los records, al inscribirse 2000 perros desde 5ta a 1ra categoria (no hubo sextas) .

La programacion duró cuatro dias, empezando el viernes 12 con el juzgamiento de quintas y cuartas categorias. El sábado 13 se juzgaron las terceras (machos y hembras) y la segunda machos. Este domingo 14 se juzga la segunda hembras, asi como las pruebas de proteccion de primera categoria y los grupos de progenie. 

El lunes, feriado en China, finalizó el Sieger con el juzgamiento de las primeras categorias de machos y de hembras.

Roberto Caputi Jr. participó en este campeonato obteniendo extraordinarios resultados:

VA3 con Arex von der Wilhemswarte

VA2 con Zara Zenteiche

Sieger Joven con Ebo von Dede

Siegerin Muy Joven con Ranny del Alto Pino

Sieger de 6-9 meses con Kanitz von Dede

El Sieger y estrella de la jornada fue DUX DE INTERCANINA, que presentó un magnífico grupo de progenie, el cual incluyó al VA5 Isko Huhnegrab, así como también a 6 hembras VA´s y varios ganadores den las clases jóvenes.

VA1 DUX DE INTERCANINA

PRIMER LUGAR 6-9 KANITZ VON DEDE (hijo de DUX DE INTERCANINA)

VA2 ZARA ZENTEICHE

VA3 AREX VON DER WILHEMSWARTE

PRINCIPALES RESULTADOS:
PRIMERA CAT. MACHOS

                                                                    SIEGER VA1 DUX DE INTERCANINA

                                                                   VA2 TONI VON DER RIESER PERLE

                                                              VA3 AREX VON DER WILHEMSWARTE

                                                           VA4 Dano von der Ostfriesischen Thingstaette

                                                           VA5 ISKO VON HUHNEGRAB (DUX DE INTERCANINA)

VA6 YUMO VON FINKENSCHLAG

VA7 MIRO VOM ZELLERGRUND

VA8 KRATSMOSEN BARONI

VA9 XANO VON DER FREIHET WESTERHOLT

VA10 DINO VON DER GLOCKENHEIDE

VA11 TIUS VOM BRAUNECK

VA12 URBO LETIHAWALD

PRIMERA CAT. HEMBRAS

VA1 Livi von Dossel (Dux de Intercanina)

VA2 Zara von der Zenteiche (FURBO)

VA3 Ilari Huhnegrab (Dux de Intercanina)

VA4 Fraud de Zenevredo (FURBO)

VA5 Eyla von Winloh (DUX DE INTERCANINA)

VA6 FRONNI BAO FENG (DUX DE INTERCANINA)

EN TOTAL 15 VA´S

Tercera Categoría Hembras, encabezada por Roberto Jr. con Ranny del Alto Pino 

SG1 Ranny dell'Alto Pino (Homar dei Colli di Uzzano-Ussy dell'Alto Pino)
presentada por Roberto Caputi Jr. 

SIEGER JOVEN  EBO VON DEDE (HIJO DE DUX DE INTERCANINA)
HANDLER: ROBERTO CAPUTI JR.

CRIADERO DE PASTORES ALEMANES
www.dicasacaputi.com
dicasacaputi@yahoo.com

CRIADERO DE PASTORES ALEMANES www.dicasacaputi.com dicasacaputi@yahoo.com

Closing the barn door...

...after the horse's escaped.

Tepco admits nuke accident avoidable

やっぱり - YAPPARI

Just as everyone thought.

Tepco (Tokyo Electric Power Company) “finally admits [that the] nuke crisis [was] avoidable”.

An investigation by Tepco's own in house task force concluded that the company “was aware safety improvements were necessary long before last year's quake and tsunami caused ... but failed to act because it feared the political, economic and legal consequences of implementing new measures.”

Furthermore, “the utility could have mitigated the impact of the Fukushima meltdowns if it had diversified the plant's power and cooling systems by paying closer heed to international standards and recommendations [and] Tepco also should have trained its employees in practical crisis-management skills, rather than conducting obligatory safety drills as a mere formality...”

A five-member member committee headed by former U.S. nuclear regulatory chief Dale Klein set up to monitor Tepco's internal task force reform plan concluded: "It's very important for Tepco to recognize the need to reform and the committee is very anxious to facilitate the reforms necessary for Tepco to become a world-class company... The committee's goal is to ensure that Tepco develops practices and procedures so an accident like (the Fukushima meltdowns) will never happen again."

NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN? We seem to hear those brave new words after every major screw up has occurred. It has the moral equivalence of “Oops! Sorry, folks. We'll be sure to keep the barn door closed next time.” Until “the next time” finds the barn door wide open once again.

Meanwhile, “investigative reports compiled by the government and Diet panels said collusion between Tepco and government regulators resulted in lax supervision and allowed the utility to continue lagging in safety measures.”

But Tepco's apparently on top of it now if you have faith in Tepco's self serving pronouncements –like this one: Takafumi Anegawa, Tepco's official in charge of nuclear asset management said: ...”the task force plans to compile recommendations by year's end 'that would have saved us from the accident, if we were able to turn back the clock'."

Hmmm, yes, well....

Looking Back: 2 - join the Navy and see the world

            My response to the restlessness and the push and tug of growing up and striking out from the bosom of the family (in view of the fact that we still had a military draft and not being particularly interested in carrying a rifle and slogging through mud and very much interested in “seeing the world”) was to enlist in the USNavy after graduating from high school in 1959. I was seventeen, feeling confined by small town life, restless, wanting to break out of my cocoon and, as I saw it, spread my wings, literally, on my first flight from Boston in a TWA airliner headed for Chicago and the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. It felt like I had truly “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” as John Gillespie had described it in his poem High Flight.

        Of course, the Post Office posters and the recruiter's enlistment pitch turned out to be somewhat different from the reality of life in the military. Thus did I become, on the one hand, addicted to the lure and fascination of faraway places and, on the other, disenchanted with the regimentation of military life.

my dog tags - the nick is for inserting the
tag between your front teeth in case of death

        As a sailor I was something of a rebel with a cause—getting through my hitch with my independence of thought reasonably intact. It grew increasingly clear to me that I was being conditioned to be a faceless cog in a machine, a number on a dog tag where thought and opinion were discouraged while adherence to strict rules and regulations were demanded. Furthermore, as time passed and I became more familiar with the guys around me, I developed the strong impression that many re-ups (career sailors), far from being fierce warriors, were really dependent type personalities who needed to be told what to do and when to do it. I also began to realize that I liked to write (thanks to a snotty ROTC wonder Ensign who demanded that I write an essay about driving carefully after I had been invoved in a traffic accident that wasn't my fault). I think that what I considered his arbitrary treatment of me as if I were  a juvenile delinquent contributed to my determination not to submit to the unquestioning obedience required of a good soldier. In short, I was not and could never be a real soldier—and I knew it.

        But I got around. And I also got a tattoo either in Milwaukee or Chicago, I don't remember which. It was the de rigeur thing to do on our first day of liberty from Great Lakes. You were supposed to brag later how you got drunk and laid and so out of your head that the supposed pain of the tattoo needle didn't bother you a bit. Well, in fact, full disclosure, there was no getting laid and I wasn't even drunk when I got the tat. Everybody invariably asks: "Did it hurt?" No. It stung like a series of mosquito bites, but it took a couple weeks to heal the scabs.  

       I was assigned to four ships in three years, sailed the Atlantic and Caribbean. Memorable [both for positive and negative reasons] ports included my stateside homeports: Norfolk, Virginia, Key West, Florida and Jacksonville, Florida. Overseas ports included Hamilton, Bermuda, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Ocho Rios, Jamaica, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Charlotte Amalie, Virgin Islands and Funchal, Madeira off the coast of Morocco in North Africa.

To be continued...

"Younger Next Year"

Younger Next Year

 then, 1986 - Dad and Kool Kid in outdoor spa

       In an older post on this blog [Career Opportunity] I talked about retirement, how I put it off until the decision was more or less made for me. I wasn't sure how I would be able to cope without the routine of a 9 to 5 job. The last time I lived on my own time was in the mid 1980s when I lived in Kurashiki (as I mentioned in a previous post [A step back in time]) and worked as a freelance English conversation teacher. Aside from preparation and class time the rest of the time was my own. That worked out well since our baby was born in 1985 and I spent a lot of my extra time being a daddy and very much enjoyed the role

Mitsu Sports Center - a pleasant 25-minute
drive in the country from our house

        But when retirement loomed, the baby was a full grown man and on his own, so there wasn't the option of filling in the time being a daddy. That career track was blocked so I hit on the idea of making preventive health my occupation of choice in retirement. Men, especially, seem to have to have an occupation and/or a purpose in life. I had already begun doing some physical exercise, taking some supplements and watching what I eat due to some mildly alarming cholesterol levels and higher than normal BMI. As a result my cholesterol levels improved and my excess weight began to drop, gram by gram.

Mitsu Sports Center 25 meter pool

        This past summer I was already in pretty decent shape when I visited the States. When I got together with an old friend from college days, she gave me some CDs about weight training for older people with the odd-sounding title “Younger Next Year”. Well, being “younger next year” sounded like a great idea to me! I decided to make my health and fitness my new “career” goal and expanded the exercise regime that I was already doing to include some weight training, some yoga (that I had neglected since college days) and some swimming. This seems like a pretty well rounded and doable regimen for a guy of my age. It's a little rigorous, and the more neglected or less used parts of my body feel it, but I expect that in time even those recalcitrant joints, muscles and tendons will mellow out—at least to a reasonable extent. You can't expect to have the body of a 20 something again, after all.

now, 2012

        I try, on average, to work out alternating with weights and yoga five days a week, go to the pool one day and take one day off—Never on Sunday! Road buddy does her own exercise regimen and we go to the pool together. We took a few forbidden photos at the pool recently and stopped at a very picturesque Japanese restaurant on the way home feeling pleasantly body tired but hungry.

       So, if you're wondering what to do with all that retirement time, get up from the recliner, turn off the TV and make taking care of your health your new career. It'll keep you focused, do wonders for your body and your outlook. Guaranteed!  

landscaped Japanese style garden with restaurant 

A step back in time

oHIGANBANA

         With the blooming of the oHIGANBANA彼岸花(honorable equinox flower) the season has turned and the sweltering Japanese summer is blessedly behind us. It's autumn again and one gets the urge to get off the mats, move around and do a bit of local traveling. So it came to pass that a friend of ours was having an art exhibition at a gallery in the first town I lived in when I came to Japan in 1980—Kurashiki 倉敷. 
 
         It was purely by chance that I got dropped in Kurashiki to fend for myself (I didn't know a word of Japanese and couldn't read the signs) by my company representative in a beautiful town that time seemed to have forgotten, not to mention that the allied bombs of World War II had ignored as well. 

typical KURA with its black
and white tiles - upper right

         The core of the town is a canal surrounded by buildings that look unchanged since the Meiji Restoration (1868) period. The canal was a river port used to send rice and other goods down to the Seto Inland Sea. And many of the wooden buildings were storehouses and granaries (kura 倉) used for storing goods before shipping. 

K gallery - little white square in center of photo
(note the black and white tiles on right)

         Today, the old merchant quarter along the weeping willow lined canal areaknown as the Bikan Chiku, with its distinctive white-walled, black-tiled warehouses is a popular tourist destination in Japan. I lived in Kurashiki from 1980 to 1988. It's only around 15 miles from our present home and we like to take a sentimental journey there from time to time to visit the old haunts. And, this time, to drop in on our friend's art exhibition at K gallery in a small alley off the canal. 

 our Mitsubishi i

 
         So, yesterday, we hopped into the Mitsubishi i and struggled along for over an hour in ghastly traffic on this 3-day holiday weekend. The return trip was even ghastlier, but I wont dwell on the dark side and just show a few photos of my first home in Japan.

Bikan Chiku - weeping willow lined canal
Meiji period river port of Kurashiki

boat landing - canal rides for tourists in period boats

stone bridge over the canal with a typical KURA in background

traditional  RYOKAN  (Japanese Inn) on the canal

Ueda's coffee house - my old TAMARIBA (hangout) since 1980

Mrs. Ueda my old Mama-san - now 78 or so and still going strong

iced coffee - my favorite

iced tea - her favorite

Buddhist temple precinct on mountain behind our old house

our house in Kurashiki from 1982 - 1988
photo taken from temple mount