The Life of the Semi-Literate

Yesterday I learned a couple of interesting things about Akita. Firstly, when a typhoon approaches the island from the Pacific side this area tends to get more humid and hot. We had been going along fairly pleasantly with cool, slightly humid weather with clouds and occasional rain, but the weather has indeed turned hot and humid because there is a typhoon approaching in the Pacific. Right now it is really windy and the dorms are filled with the moaning of high wind passing over its various openings. woooooooo

I went to Aeon to get vital fruits and vegetables, as well as bread, and along the way I was noticing the many interesting things there are to see just over the course of a small distance. I will probably never be able to get a decent picture of any of them because the route we take has no margin that I could walk in, so even if I got motivated to go for a long walk I couldn't see these sights safely on foot. There are a couple of large pillars, like the ones that support overpasses, in a valley that the road curves through on the hillside. There are no signs that any road was ever being built in the direction of these pillars, and there isn't much of anything to be seen on the other side of the valley, so I really see no reason why they would build a bridge over it. Although, Japanese construction is very unobtrusive and tidy, so it could be coming but they just haven't disturbed the landscape yet, and the pillars could have been built carefully so as to not disrupt the area around them. I saw an example of road maintenance in Tokyo near the first hostel, which is what led me draw that conclusion about Japanese construction. They had to dig up the sidewalk for some reason on the corners of a couple if blocks, but they did it with one small, purple backhoe and the rest by hand. They carefully cordoned off a lane to make into a sidewalk detour and rolled out a little labeled green plastic walkway and had people to conduct the pedestrians and automobiles through the intersection. The workers were mostly older Japanese men and they were picking up the brick for the sidewalk, dusting them off and neatly stacking them on pallets. At night everything would be cleaned up, put away, and covered, so people could use the sidewalk when there was no construction. They simply covered up the exposed dirt and holes and unrolled black plastic textures mats. At AIU right now they are beginning two new buildings but you hardly notice it, except for some smaller noises and the fact that there is a purple backhoe on campus. I'm rather taken by these backhoes, they are very cute: rounded and small. I shall have to take a picture of it.

Anyway the point I was actually trying to get to was about the abundant cedar forests in this area. According to my Business Culture teacher there isn't much logging here because it's too expensive, imported wood is cheaper, so they don't bother cutting trees here. I am amazed by this- how can something so big shipped from overseas be cheaper? The answer probably lies in governmental policy and possibly something about the hilly terrain and transportation, but I can't make any assertions about those two.
Flowers I found cut down in a garden area across the street from the school. I need to ask my roommate, but I think that a lot of people have allocated plots in a communal gardening area. On the first day I was here I saw the high hedge around this place and the numbered gridded sign and I wondered if it was a weird kind of maze, but then the next day all of the tall grass and weeds had been cut down and some of the plots looked like they had been rototilled. Now the garden has been plants and it is mostly covered in sheets of black plastic.
Amusing name, ne?