Jim O’Connell Photographs, The Blog.

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The Dojunkai Apartments : The
Beginning of Apartment Living
　The current mainstream steel reinforced
concrete apartments that were built prior to
World War II are called Dojunkai apartments.
The Dojunkai was a foundation established
following the Great Kanto Earthquake to help
victims in need of shelter. It was an external
body of the Interior Ministry and was funded
by contributions from within Japan and
overseas. The Dojunkai supplied 12,000
housing units, including 2,500 apartments,
between 1926 and 1941. All of the
apartments were reinforced concrete structures
that placed a premium on earthquake
resistance and most of the properties were
three stories in height. In addition to having
proper electricity, plumbing and gas, each of
the units was equipped with flush toilets. At
the time they were built, these housing units
were well known and admired for their
leading-edge conveniences and technologies
such as elevators, steam heaters, telephones
and baths. The aforementioned comforts
proved to be very popular despite the
concern that the apartment style of housing
might not be well accepted as a part of
Japanese lifestyle.

Quoted from http://xrl.us/oq6bk

Photographer Brian Peterson of Zokyo fame and I have been working on a new project for the past couple weeks, working for hours a day with an open Skype call going, usually with at least a couple others on the line, discussing every little detail of how to put together our new site, Magnesium.

It’s almost ready to go, but I thought I’d spread around a little link love for the search thingies.

Photos I shot in Kawagoe for the New York Times:

Just yesterday, I was talking to my sister Leslie about how much less people rely on cars here in Japan Tokyo than they do in the states - as an example, I told her how I had seen on old man making deliveries for a Chinese restaurant. He was in his seventies and made his deliveries by bicycle. He had a half-dozen bowls of soup in ceramic bowls balanced on a wooden tray, balanced on his shoulder, on a bicycle.
Today at lunch, I saw a much younger delivery guy with a couple of bowls and I happened to have my camera ready, so I got this picture:

It’s not uncommon to see a woman with two or three children on a bike, or perhaps a business man with an umbrella riding in the rain. Police, of course, do most of their patrolling by bike.

I wonder if that has anything to do with the longer average lifespan in Japan?

Time Magazine used to have an article that made Bush look foolish. They have recently removed it from their website.

This is an unethical and wrong move on the part of Time.

I’ve lost a lot of respect for the quality of writing at Time over the years, but this goes beyond anything of which I would have imagined them capable. It of course brings to mind the famous phrase by Orwell:

Who controls the past, controls the future.
Who controls the present, controls the past.

—- 1984 by George Orwell

TIME: Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam
By GEORGE (H.W.) BUSH AND BRENT SCOWCROFT

Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in “mission creep,” and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.’s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different–and perhaps barren–outcome.

Via slashdot

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