The narrow streets and low walls of the Nagamachi samurai district in Kanazawa

The river near our hotel, tamed by concrete

The pachinko parlour near our hotel

Certificate in a shop in Nagamachi, awarding a prize to Kaburagi Tahei porcelain at the St. Louis' World's Fair. Prices inside went up to $1,000 for a single small tea cup.

Traditional samurai houses, and we start to wonder about being homeless. We took it easy a bit, exploring near our hotel on foot. We went to the Nagamachi district, full of traditional samurai houses, almost all of them private residences today. We saw our first Postal scooter, and small red motorscooter with a rear-mounted trunk for the mail, ridden by a uniformed Japanese postwoman.

Where we will go? Not realizing that the Japanese are VERY into viewing the tree in their fall colors, I hadn't booked any hotels for our next stop, Osaka & the Kansai area - thinking this would give us some flexibility to go or stay as we pleased to different areas. I spent about two hours on the internet, maybe more, and couldn't find any hotels that had rooms for the entire length of time we wanted to stay in Osaka.

TV is better when you can't understand it. We spent some time watching Japanese TV, and discovered the fascination of watching TV when you can't understand the language. We flipped to one channel and found a group of young Japanese men in a high-tech control room supervised by a young woman in a smart business skirt and coat. Lights were flashing and everyone looked worried. What could it be? Was Godzilla destroying Tokyo (again)? Or maybe it was, "The Shinkansen is going to be one minute late! What are we going to do?"

It turned out to be a "News at Six" kind of (light-hearted) drama. The woman was a news director, and ended up making a decision to replace the good-looking but vapid young male anchor with the ousted, elderly, but very distinguised past anchor. Of course he did a fantastic job, vindicating the director's risky decision.

We have so much in common. Watching TV without understanding the language also reminds us of how much all people have in common. The plots are completely understandable (and in the manner of TV, predictable) even without understanding the words. One comedy had a scene where a man in the hospital is being visited by two women simultaneously. Well, almost . . . they were never in his room at the same time, and each time one entered, he had to scramble around to try and hide the gifts the other one had brought. A variation on the classic sitcom "Oh no, both my girlfriends decided to show up at my apartment on the same night. I'll just keep them both in different rooms and run back and forth and everything will be fine."

The importance of listening. One slight difference we've seen in Japanese TV shows is the apparent importance of people listening. On talk shows, if the camera has a close up on someone who is speaking, there will often be a small inset picture showing the host or another panel member who is listening to the speaker. This is very common, but I'm not sure what it's all about.