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  • Japan on a Budget: Kumamoto

    If you’re traveling around Kyushu, you’re likely to pass through Kumamoto more than once. Which is fine, as it’s a really pleasant city in which to while away a few hours or days. Transport and Trains Kumamoto is on the Kyushu Shinkansen line, roughly half-way down the island and so between Hakata in the north…

  • Japan on a Budget: Nagasaki and Shimabara

    Everybody knows of Nagasaki for one reason. And, like Hiroshima, it’s the home to both an excellent museum documenting the nuclear attack and some moving memorials to the victims. But, away to the South, there’s much more to see besides – if you’re in Kyushu, it’s a city I wouldn’t want to miss. Transport and…

  • Japan on a Budget: Fukuoka

    A few years back I traveled around the Kansai area, and last year I headed North from Tokyo to visit the Tohoku region. This year, something a bit different – sidestepping Tokyo altogether, I decided to visit the south-western island of Kyushu. In the end I managed to almost entirely circle the island, taking in…

  • When bad news makes money, making up bad news is good business

    The other day a message scrolled past in my Twitter feed: Which made me think: if the sea off Fukushima really were boiling, I’m pretty sure we would have heard about it. Except if there were some sort of amazing cover-up, in which case why would NHK (which is, essentially, the Japanese BBC) be showing…

  • Stuff the App Store needs to do..

    The iOS App Store really is a brilliant thing. I first learned to program way before internet access was widely available, so the options for sharing my first creations (in STOS Basic, on the Atari ST), amounted to 3.5in floppy disks – today, if you can code something you can easily distribute it to a…

  • No, Jeremy Hunt has not saved Lewisham A&E

    I’m putting this online to preempt the inevitable Evening Standard headlines claiming that Jeremy Hunt has today spared Lewisham Hospital’s A&E department. From his statement today: On the emergency care proposals, Sir Bruce was concerned that the recommendation for a non-admitting Urgent Care Centre at Lewisham may not lead, in all cases, to improved patient…

  • Japan on a Budget: Fukushima-ken

    Aizuwakamatsu, Fukushima-ken Three years ago, most people probably hadn’t heard of Fukushima. Today everybody has heard of it, but very few people are visiting. This is a great shame, for many reasons. The name itself is something of a problem. Fukushima is the prefecture, a city within it, and also the namesake of the nuclear…

  • Japan on a Budget: Hirosaki and Aomori

    Inside the Hakkoda-Maru Aomori-ken sits at the very top of Honshu. Getting there on the train is as easy as you could hope: Shin-Aomori is the current terminus of the Tohoku Shinkansen, so you can leap on a Hayate service from Tokyo or, like me, catch it from Morioka, where the Akita mini-shinkansen line meets…