Martti Ahtisaari is a former Finnish president and the recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He came to Japan to speak on conflict resolution and then toured the tsunami-stricken areas near Sendai. I got to tag along and interview him for around a half-hour in the van on the way back to the shinkansen station.

The interview will go up on Nippon.com, which is the big project keeping us busy at Japan Echo these days. I have a blog post to write about all of that. It will happen soon.

Life in Tokyo goes on and on. Trains move, people ride them to work and leap in front of them when they’re tired of that game. The summer heat is here and we’re concerned about power shortages. Not concerned enough to refrain from topping up the iPhone battery so we can take photos of the Sōbu line at Yotsuya and post them during the Chūō ride home, though.

The way around this, according to some threads I found on Apple’s support forums, was to go through the entire iPhone photo library and delete all the offending images, leaving only photos and videos taken with the phone itself. A nice solution if you discover the problem early on, but when you have hundreds and hundreds of photos in there—and they don’t give any indication of which ones are native and which ones were imported via mail or the web—it isn’t such a nice thing to have to deal with.

I did find a nice app called JuicePhone that let me make a browsable backup of everything on my phone. The best part: it didn’t require me to jailbreak the phone, something I have no particular desire or need to do. The other best part: it was free. A nice piece of software to keep around even in this glorious age of iOS 4, when the photo sync issue has been fixed. (I just finished using Image Capture to grab all 3.whatever GB of videos and photos off of the phone and make additional backups of them.)

A quick, content-free post to stick this photo up on the site. I have a batch to go up on Flickr soon from our trip to Yuzawa a few weekends ago. Sakura’s first time in the real snow! She didn’t mind the chair-lift ride on my lap at all, but was scared when I snowplowed down the green slope with her in my arms. Maybe next season. (The sleds and inner tubes were much more her speed.)

Taken a minute or so into the year 2009 . . . Just a quick post to show that the website isn’t dead. May this year see more posts from me.

Taken at Jindaiji in the late nineteenth century. Not. Actually it was taken at Jindaiji a few years ago (the original is here) and run through this cool online “old photo generator” called the 幕末古写真ジェネレーター (Bakumatsu old photo generator). Perfect for making your shots of Kabukicho neon last weekend look like they belong in an Isabella Bird book.

(Hat tip to Asiajin for this one.)

Kind of a cool photo, for obvious reasons.

Some stickers Jes sent over in a package last year . . . Bob and his cat spend some quality time on the slopes of Japan’s mountains each winter.