Because it is dangerous you may not enter

There are dangers

We're back in Japan after another two-week, four-state, five-bed tour. We were mostly lucky with the weather while we were there. Maryland was bizarrely balmy and New York, while ear-bitingly cold, was not covered in thick ice and slush this time. We left dogged by storms, though. The six-a.m. road to the airport had already had a few inches of sleet plowed off it. The freezing rain didn't stop us from taking off, but thunderstorms in Atlanta sent us into a holding pattern and finally to a refueling stop in Columbus, Georgia. After waiting in line and then on the phone and then in line again for a few hours, we slipped out between thunderstorms on a flight to LA with reports of tornadoes behind us. Jim's dad picked us up at John Wayne International and took us out for fish tacos and fries. We paused for a digital refueling in a Starbucks parking lot, sipping a little free WiFi to send emails explaining our half-day delay, and then he dropped us off for a midnight flight out of LAX. From LA it was smooth sailing. Behind us, though, we again left a trail of rain, as the City of Angels was soon hit with unusual downpours. We arrived at five a.m. to clear skies in Tokyo. By afternoon it was raining, and that night the city got a few record-breaking inches of snow and commute-ruining ice. Frozen sidewalks and streets are no joke. There were almost three thousand car accidents and hundreds of people went to the hospital with injuries. On my walk to work, I saw a few old men scraping the sidewalk with coal shovels. Friends reported shop owners pouring hot water over the ice to melt it. Er. I didn't see any salt or sand. The picture above is my favorite strategy for keeping people from slipping: roping off the dangerous area and putting up a wonderfully generic danger sign.

Recycling day, Roppongi

Each truck has its own cargo and its own personality.

Yakudoshi: My horoscope said it would be a bad year

Happy 2012! Would be a shame if anything bad were to happen to your nice new year...

Your yakudoshi is an "inauspicious year," or a "year of calamity." Other translations put a more positive spin on the expression as a "critical year," but overall, during the ages 24, 41 and 60 for men and 18, 32 and 36 for women, you should stay sharp. You are supposed to be extra vulnerable to sickness and general poor luck during these years and the years immediately before and after. Luckily, you can go to a shinto shrine and have the bad juju removed by purchasing some combination of charms and purification rituals. And lest you think you'll take your chances with the less-bad luck of the year following the main yakudoshi, my friend says that this atoyaku is trouble for the people around you, you selfish bastard. Have they got every angle of this protection racket covered or what?
This photo is at Meiji Jingu. I strolled over in the late afternoon today. There were hundreds of people lined up waiting to go for first prayer at the shrine. I stuck to my new year's resolution to stay out of insanely long lines and just walked around. I had a bowl of restorative tonjiru pork soup and enjoyed the atmosphere. Most of the friends and families were casual, and some were in suits or kimono. It was crowded but relaxed, except near the subway entrance that appears among the trees only once a year and opens directly onto the shrine grounds. Here uniformed traffic controllers with bullhorns stood every few yards.
I imagine there were a few prayers that the deep earthquake this afternoon is the last one for a while. This is year Heisei 24 on the Japanese calendar. Entire countries can't have a yakudoshi, can they? I'd buy a charm if it would help.