{"id":40,"date":"2003-08-11T13:09:40","date_gmt":"2003-08-11T04:09:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/2003\/08\/11\/40\/"},"modified":"2013-07-30T01:19:50","modified_gmt":"2013-07-29T16:19:50","slug":"40","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/2003\/08\/11\/40\/","title":{"rendered":"\u82b1\u706b"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\"Picture<\/a>\"Picture<\/a>\"Picture<\/a>\"Picture<\/a>\"Picture<\/a>\"Picture<\/a>\"Picture<\/a>\"Picture<\/a>\"Picture<\/a><\/div>\n

If you have any interest in recent Japanese movies in general and Takeshi Kitano’s in particular, then you might already know that Japanese for fireworks is Hana-bi (\u82b1\u706b)…
\n
\nYou also probably know that it is made of the kanjis for flower (hana: \u82b1) and fire (bi: \u706b), hence: fire flower… fireworks… And if you didn’t, now you do.<\/p>\n

Anyway, just to say that’s what I did yesterday: I met up with a few friends in Odaiba for one of the most important matsuri (japanese traditional festival) of the summer.
\nWe spent the afternoon on “Tokyo Beach” (not much of a beach really, but a good spot to chat and sip beer on the sand while waiting for sundown) while thousands of young Japanese, of which a fair share was wearing traditional yukatta (light summer kimono), converged to the place to watch the fireworks (eventually it got quite crowded: apparently something like a million people came for what was the 400th celebration of the Edo period, if I understood correctly)…
\nThen we had an hour long display of hanabi with some quite impressive patterns (hearts, cats and other animal faces everywhere in the sky)…<\/p>\n

Funny Sidenote<\/i>
\nWhile hanging around on the way back, I also saw one seriously massive spider: bigger than most African spiders I’ve ever seen…
\nDunno why, I was somewhat under the impression that arachnids of such a nasty size were the appanage of remote African grounds… apparently not…
\nAlthough its body was about the size of my thumb, I don’t think it was any dangerous: quite impressive nonetheless. Unfortunately, the strong lighting in the back and lack of focuse control on my little camera made it hard to get a decent shot, but here is what I was able to film anyway:<\/p>\n

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If you have any interest in recent Japanese movies in general and Takeshi Kitano’s in particular, then you might already know that Japanese for fireworks is Hana-bi (\u82b1\u706b)…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11,9,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-friends","category-only-in-japan","category-pictures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6698,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions\/6698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}