Tag Archives: Japan

Blogger Hashi discovered a rather wonderful piece of Japanese art which he sums up beautifully:

The whole scroll, which is called He-Gassen (“The Fart Battle”) is just about people farting. Farting at other people, farting at cats, farting off of horses, farting into bags; just farting everywhere.

The whys and wherefores of the scrolls origin is lost to time but he speculaties

I kept expecting to find some deep cultural explanation as to why these guys made whole scrolls about farting. But I think it really just boils down to one universal truth: farts are funny.

You can’t say fairer than that.

[via @ameliacc]

As the world commemorated the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, Sunday had another significance for Japan. It marked six months since the massive earthquake and tsunami on March 11, a date now seared in the country’s national consciousness. At 2:46 that afternoon, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck Japan offshore, triggering a tsunami wave of up to 10 meters (33 ft) that engulfed large parts of northeastern Japan and also damaged the Fukushima nuclear plant, causing the worst nuclear crisis in decades. The current number of dead and missing is estimated to be 22,900.

ABOVE: A view of Higashi-Matsushima, Miyagi prefecture, after the massive earthquake, tsunami, and the aftermath taken by Kyodo on March 14, 2011, (before), and September 1, 2011

MEGA GALLERY: Japan Earthquake: Six Months later (The Atlantic)

We’ve all seen footage and photographs of the horrific aftermath of the quake and tsunami in Japan, but there’s something especially haunting about this 360Cities active panorama of decimated Rikuzen-Takada in the Iwate Prefecture.

An entire town, deserted and reduced to landfill.

View it here.

BoingBoing
‘Before’ pic (top)