Japan Ho!

Went to Japan for 2 days on a quick biz-ness jaunt (with a brief stop in Seoul, ate too much & drank too much, but did have a massage from a blind person for the first time)

Highlight was visiting Kyoto with my friend Mutsumi.
I took the bullet train down from Tokyo, in between got a clear-eyed view of Mt Fuji for the first time so that was great fun. In Kyoto she took to visit the various castles once occupied by the Shoguns. My favorite was the Nin Nin Castle (middle picture) where the Last Shogun presided. Aside from having extraordinary, original artwork, two facts really interested me: 1) only females were allowed in the inner court, including body guards; 2) the floor was engineered in a special way that nobody how lightly you walked it gave way to a sing-song noise thus it was called the Sparrow Floor (so you knew if an assassin was creeping in).

The food. The FOOD! It's so good I'm going to have to save it for another posting.

In Osaka I went to a public bath frequently visited by the Yakuza, and just like that, I'm sitting next to a buck-naked Japanese man with a single tattoo of the Buddha on his back and he was brushing his teeth.

One cool feature of this particular bath was the ''electric pool'' which is exactly what it sounds like, a pool with electric currents. It numbs your hand & feet and is really an unque sensation.