Before 2009 came to its sudden halt, I went along with a group of aikidoka and friends to hike Nijouzan (Mt. Nijo), which is situated in Nara prefecture overlooking Osaka to its northwest and Nara city to its northeast. Our sojourn started by assembling at 8:30 AM at the Kintetsu Abenobashi station, and from there [...]
The 2009 Annual Conference for FIRST is going to be held this year in Kyoto, Japan from 28 June-3 July. Owing to the fact that I live literally just down the road from Kyoto, I thought I would share some travel tips in a series of short articles that might help make arriving at and [...]
Well, there aren’t really any whales there, but the Osaka Kaiyukan Aquarium does have some really spectacular whale sharks in their enormous tanks for public display. I saw them this past weekend, when I spent the day with a group of other Japanese language students from the Osaka YMCA Gakuin on a field trip to [...]
Welcome to Kyoto What city hosts the headquarters of Nintendo and has the second largest train station in Japan? Why, that’d be Kyoto! I guess the more popular things for which people know Kyoto are the myriad of historically significant locations, including the 17 locations in and around Kyoto that have been designated as a [...]
Welcome to Japan Unless you already live in Japan, the first step in getting to Kyoto is, of course, making landing at a port of entry and then traveling onward to the final destination. Kyoto’s situated in the center part of the largest island of Japan, about 100 km north of Osaka; Kyoto itself is [...]
