Cultural Geography Blog

  Watched this tonight on MUBI. It's a lovely meditative film following the life of a toilet cleaner who likes routines, and noticing... and trees... His routine keeps getting interrupted by various events. There's plenty of little vignettes of the city... and a sense of lots of lives intersecting briefly... and other relationships built by repetition. Very much a quotidian story and a personal psychogeography of Tokyo based around toilets, an underground noodle bar, and the laundrette... and a weekly exchange of film and photographs. This review nails it: “Next time is next time, now is now.” Throughout Perfect Days entire two hour runtime, we stay together with our protagonist Hirayama, a toilet cleaner in Tokyo, as he lives his life of quiet, lovely solitude, one moment at a time. There are no flashbacks, no exposition dumps, no cutaways to another time or place. We never leave Hirayama’s side, and Hirayama himself never strays from being truly present in every single moment...

Discovered over on Instagram. Daisuke Semejima paints 360 spherical art and in the words of their bio: I create works that change the perspective of everyday landscapes 途中経過をたくさん見て頂いた作品完成しました。 手で回転させてる動画でどうぞ！ 『Flatball 2022 No.04』 これも個展に出します！ pic.twitter.com/jrWKI2pJOY — 鮫島大輔/DaisukeSamejima (@samejimadaisuke) January 7, 2023 Check out the gallery on the website. Some more examples here too , which reinforces the link with the quotidian: "The paintings convey a sense of familiarity, offering an outsider’s view of the commonplace existence of Japanese suburbia."

The 1st of September is Disaster Prevention Day in Japan. It commemorates the Great Kanto earthquake that took place on that date in 1923 9/1 is Bosai ( #DisasterPrevention ) Day--visit the #BosaiDiversity site and better prepare yourself by discovering the many unique emergency needs of a diverse society. https://t.co/EMUl9rpaLi #ResilientJapan #LandOfDiversity pic.twitter.com/qCqymatg2C — The Gov't of Japan (@JapanGov) September 1, 2019 I've blogged previously about my Tokyo Bosai book, which was handed out to all households in the city. One of them decided to sell theirs on eBay. Check out the Bosai Diversity website  for a video and a set of cards of items which would be of particular value to particular people.  Click on the cards and tags and assemble your own kit , and recognise the different needs should a disaster arise. You can also share the kit you create with others... Looking to see if I can find the cards as a PDF download rather tha...

A nice piece on Atlas Obscura. It describes a daily ritual which can be observed (or rather, heard) across Japan, at or around 5pm. It's the  shichouson bousai gyousei musen housou It’s known as the ‘5pm Chime’ (五時のチャイム) or, more officially (and tellingly), the ‘Municipal Disaster Management Radio Communication Network’ (市町村防災行政無線). That should give you some clue as to what it is for, and why you’ve probably never really understood it. After all, if all you’ve ever heard is eerie chimes or music at dusk, that likely means you’ve not experienced any major disasters (a good thing!) Officially then, the speaker network is part of a nationwide system set up around most villages, towns and cities to warn residents in the case of emergency – especially disaster warnings for tsunamis and informational broadcasts in response to earthquakes. Some systems are also set up to broadcast announcements of severe weather, fire, suspicious persons, dangerous wildlife or simply just...

A Kanji i s an adopted Chinese visual character which is used in the Japanese writing system. The Kanji of the Year for 2018 has been announced: 災 , pronounced  wazawai  or  sai , meaning “disaster” or “misfortune.” The Japan Kanji Aptitude Foundation each December announces a “kanji of the year,” selected by popular vote to encapsulate the year that was. Members of the public send in votes by postal mail, an official website, or voting boxes, selecting a single character and often appending an explanation for the choice. This year’s top pick,  wazawai , referred to the multitude of natural disasters that afflicted the archipelago during 2018—serious earthquakes in Osaka, Hokkaidō, and Shimane Prefectures, a string of typhoons that battered the nation’s shores, torrential rains causing landslides and flooding, and the record-setting heat of summer. “As we look ahead to the coming year,” noted the JKAF press release, “many are hoping that the new imperial reign...

This is coming in August. It looks really rather splendid, although the extract is harrowing and terrifying... Read the extract from the London Review of Books. There's also a programme on BBC Radio 4 that is well worth watching.

..is something that a lot of us have been doing for the last week... So have other colleagues...  Simon Jones has posted the results of his thinking on the presentation below, which he has shared on Slideshare. Some really interesting and challenging questions... Thinking about disasters View more presentations from Simon Jones There was also a response from the Guardian's DATA BLOG, which had a comparison between Japan and Haiti as part of its DECADE OF DISASTERS piece. There is also a useful NUCLEAR POWER feature which shows the number of power plants that may now have an uncertain future, and face far more stringent safety checks and procedures. Useful mapping in both of these features... Responses to the disaster have spread far and wide. Fears over the nuclear radiation that is likely to spread from the Fukushima plant caused salt to sell out in China. Thanks also to Fred Martin for sending through this intriguing link. This is all 6 major channels at ...

Just after 7am on Friday morning I pulled into a multi storey car park in central Coventry. I had set off rather earlier than I needed to ensure that I was on time for an NQT event that I was running, and as I checked my mail and Twitter feeds, news started to come in of an earthquake and tsunami... The rest of the day was spent running the conference, and by the time I got home at 7pm that night, there was a clear sense that this was going to be very bad news for Japan and the rest of the world... It became obvious that a lot of colleagues were hard at work over the weekend preparing a range of resources. My colleague Anne Greaves at the GA had produced a really useful page of materials at short notice on the Friday in my absence. Below is the text of the update that I will send to Anne for addition to the GA website tomorrow (Monday) but it is here for early access, and also for possible comment... This is a draft, and is my personal response to the events in Japan... Update...