Hurt my back and can't move much nor sit long. The cause as far as I can remember is that I lifted a small box of a hanging scroll (forged painting of 応挙) from floor to a shelf in a 140cm high storage room --- not enough hight for a grow…

The average temperature yesterday was well below ten Celsius but inside the house was kept almost constant from 22 to 24. What makes this ideal condition? An insulated layer of concrete lying under the floor does. It stores heat during nig…

Carl Sagan said each of us is an integrated entity of 10,000 trillion cells. Each cell carries a complete copy of the blue print of you, according to which you have been created and sustained. Somehow each cell knows its own job: remember …

Went to Nagoya University to talk over the issue of our future collaborative research work. As it turned out, they would like me to be a visiting professor. Visiting professor? I did't have any idea what the post was like. I am not the lea…

To provide technological consultation for the company I retired from, I visited their office in Kawasaki. The problem they are facing now is an old and new issue. Old because we've had similar problems for a long time, new because we haven…

This might be it. Perfectly trapezoidal, snow covered, glowing in a morning sunlight, standing aloof against the blue sky. This is THE Fuji Osamu Dazai(太宰治) described as "shamefully beautiful"; expression perhaps only the Japanese can u…

Lying on a sofa and looking up at the sky, I see clouds flowing reluctantly from the west to east. I float with them, adrift.

Something has been wrong with this house foliage plant called Ficus Umbellata. Here and there on the surface of leaves is sticky liquid. I took a lick of it. Sweet! When Mrs. toshi4374 looked carefully deep into the foliage, she at last fo…

The sky flared up. The mountain stood there, with dignified loneliness.

Isn't this the view I used to see from the west-facing window when I was small? At the end of the second floor corridor, there the window was, half covered with an old drawer. Through the other half, the sun was watched setting behind the …

Participated in an international meeting. Made a presentation for the first time in ten or so years, renewed my acquaintance with researchers both in academy and business, catching up on our recent activities, which for my side is nothing …

Got up at six-thirty and walked to the living room in pajamas without flinging a gown on or socks as usual. Surprised to find the wireless thermometer, which I had set up outside on the balcony wall(pointed by a blue arrow in the photo), s…

The number of visitors of a blog seems considerably proportional to its update frequency. I hadn't updated for about 3 weeks and the access counter had not advanced much. Well, after all it gets only what it deserves. And visitors once lef…

Read about Cambrian explosion. Hundreds of millions of years ago, all of a sudden, huge number of animal phyla and species appeared like from nowhere. It seems like all the basic body designs were tested then. Any creatures, from earthworm…

You can never describe colors. But try. Then you might be aware that it is possible... in a way. Look at the picture. Cottony layers of pearly-colored clouds, dark purple at the top, brighter pink stripes near the horizon, in between is a …

The summer is passing at last, leaving us unforgettable memory of purgatorial heat, dog days, day after day, relentless, even during the nights, coupled with suffocating humidity. But, yes, there has been great happiness along the way. Our…

Never get bored when watching the sky in twilight.

This trilobite prowls around in a room and is supposed to eat up dust and dirt on floors. A gift from my sister, the secondhand gismo is so stupid that she seems to have decided to throw it away in our new house. However, as it turns out, …

He came from northern England, stayed 3 weeks with our family, fully enjoyed boiling heat here in Tokyo, Kyoto and Hiroshima, and last week went back to his country, where the highest temperature is only 15 degree Celsius. Unlike most of t…

The fireworks seen from the balcony were like a luminous speck but our imagination inflated them to the huge ball of showering lights with a diameter of hundreds of meters. Sitting on a chair in the breeze of the night with a glass of cold…

I really can't do two things at a time. I can't study or read while listening to music. If I forced music down into my ears through earphones, like young people these days do, I couldn't concentrate on anything else. When my children were …

When an evening draws near, the west sky over the horizon will turn to a milky tangerine, which gradually blends into a surrendering blue.

Game is over Here's visualized dynamism of steam, ice particles and air flow, called cloud. Far, far away is the cluster of newly built high-rise buildings in Musashi Kosugi. Today is one of those days when we can feel the dynamism, vastne…

Haven't updated awhile. I have been busy writing Japanese blog^^. Meanwhile my house was completed. And soon we are going to move. For the time being, we will be too busy to do anything besides the move, which includes the start and stop o…

Our new house will be completed in two weeks... I hope... When I look back, this six months was not as long as I first thought. Actually it passed like a dream of a night. But yesterday I found a sheer evidence of what it has been like(pic…

The train was already waiting at the platform when I went down the stairs to change lines. The bell went off. It would leave in a few seconds. I dashed toward the train. Ahead of me was a middle-aged woman with horizontally well-developed …

I've written a research paper. It is only a 2-page proceeding of an international symposium but perhaps will be the last one in my life. For the first time in probably a couple of years, I called my friend to Swiss office who had discussed…

The falcon died leaving behind gleaming streaks of her trail in the jet-black darkness of the sky. Barely ahead of her broken-up body was a tiny shimmering orange object, the only son for whom she endured the troubled space odyssey. He too…

Nirvana Without my knowing the season has changed. A summer has already sneaked in and I find myself using an electric fan. Bliss, nirvana, Shangrila, beatitude or whatever, I fall into a half-doze and awake.

DIET Having something to investigate, I went to the Diet Library. In English it sounds to the Japanese like a library for people wishing to cut down on their calories. But in Japanese it is 国会図書館, which instead you would think is for …