I never thought sewers could be a thing of beauty, unless perhaps under the pen of Umberto Eco, but there photos are absolutely spectacular. I found them in this blog post. And you can see a complete collection at this Japanese website (note it is flash and correspondingly slow). The photos are from the sewage system in the Edogawa Ward of Tokyo.
Up the road from our house a couple of kilometers. I took this photo yesterday whilst out for a bike ride. Still rainy season here, although it isn’t the monsoon rainy season I had imagined from reading George Orwell as a university student. It is more like steady drizzle which reminds me of Christchurch weather. There certainly are a lot of open spaces near where we live. And a wide range of architectural styles. This house looks like it wouldn’t be too out of place on the West Coast. The hills in the background are part of the Tsukuba Range (don’t know that hills name) – it has been heavily cut into by an open cast mine but you can’t see that too clearly in the photo. A very nice area to ride ones bike around.
token |ˈtÅkÉ™n|
noun: 1 a thing serving as a visible or tangible representation of something abstract : mistletoe was cut from an oak tree as a token of good fortune.
adjective: done for the sake of appearances or as a symbolic gesture : cases like these often bring just token fines from the courts.
This photo was taken a wee while ago with my trusty little mobile phone when I was out cycling near our old apartment in Tsukuba. I have seen signs representing this company around a fair bit and was quite amused by it. It is not your usual 13 year old Japanese school girl wearing a t-shirt saying “world champion urine drinker” which, while I find it ironic, I don’t really find terribly funny. Explaining what it means might be, but I don’t think I want to go there.
The rare thing about this one is that it isn’t strange English. The “token” in Token Corporation actually is made up of two characters – the to that you see in Tokyo or Kyoto means east while ken means construction. So it really would be east construction – east here referring to the plains around Tokyo – the Kanto Plains. So while it looks really strange to me it is a real Japanese word.
Whether Token Corporation is a “token corporation” is another question entirely. Their website, or the English part thereof hasn’t been updated since 2001. Given that they knock up apartments and flats which often raises the ire of local residents is a question that a few people would raise.
Found some nice photos from around Xinjiang at mongabay.com. Mongabay.com aims to raise interest in wildlife and wildlands while promoting awareness of environmental issues. The photographer writes:
In September 2006, I, along with two friends, visited this distant land of breath-taking landscapes and fascinating local culture. The purpose of our trip was to visit Datong, a Tajik village located deep in the Kunlun Shan mountains of Xinjiang. Along the way I took hundreds of photos and met dozens of kind and wonderful souls.
The roads are rough dirt, frequently washed out by flash floods or buried in rockfalls or landslides. Reaching Datong requires a four-wheel- drive vehicle and precision driving skills. The village is several hours’ drive from Tashkurgan, a town known for its ancient stone fortress once used as a stopping point for Silk Road caravans.
Some really stunning photos there, which bring back good memories of the time we spent there earlier this year.
In a bit of a Korla mash-up – a story from China Business Blog about the news that Xinjiang’s delicious fragrant pears will, after 13 years of negotiations be accepted for export to the United States of America.
China is to export fragrant pears specially grown in northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region to the United State  after 13 years of negotiations.
More on the decision to export fragrant pears on the China Business blog.
And on another note, Michael, of The Opposite End of China fame has made it back safely from the Mt. Everest base camp. He has some beautiful pictures of the worlds highest mountain kingdom up on his blog with hopefully more coming soon.
On the subject of photos, this photo was stolen from Michaels blog by your truly and show my former Uyghur teacher in his family’s pear orchard. A great guy, and I am sure he is over the moon that his family’s produce can now be exported.
 Militaryphotos.net has some interesting pictures up of the Chinese army taking part in anti-terrorist exercises held recently in Yining, Xinjiang.
From their website:
In this photo released by China’s Xinhua News Agency, a Chinese cavalry unit gathers in the suburb of Yining, northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Friday, Aug. 25, 2006. Border forces from China and Kazakhstan held an anti-terrorism drill Saturday with armed helicopters and anti-riot vehicles, the official Xinhua News Agency said. The exercise, which involved some 700 border police, included a simulated battle in which Chinese guards were supposed to force a group of terrorists into a narrow valley and cliff caves in Yining, a Chinese city near the Central Asian border with Kazakhstan, Xinhua said. (AP Photo/Xinhua, Li Gang)
Yining is a sensitive area for the Chinese, with Uighur separatists seeing Yining as being a focal point and expression of their hopes and dreams for independence. This next extract from the Jamestown Foundation explains in a bit more the background to the situation in Yining:
Yining: Bastion of Uighur Nationalism
Yining is the heart of the Ili valley which faces towards Kazakhstan and is populated with ethnic minorities. As the birthplace of the short-lived independent republic of Eastern Turkestan proclaimed in 1944, it has maintained a tradition of ethnically-based opposition (referred to as Pan-Turkism in China) to the Chinese presence.
In 1997, a peaceful demonstration turned into a full-scale two-day riot resulting in several casualties among both the police and the protesters. The Yining riots subsequently became a symbol for Uighur nationalism and a warning that the Chinese took extremely seriously with a crackdown on alleged instigators or participants which lasted several years with hundreds of executions and thousands of detentions, as well as dozens of related extraditions from neighboring countries. It was also alleged that “foreign” elements had played a role in the riots, including the aforementioned Pakistani man executed in 1999.
Read the rest of the Xinjiang: An Emerging Narco-Islamist Corridor? (http://www.jamestown.org)
