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Flowers Against Crime
Suginami City in Tokyo had a reputation as a burglary hotspot, with over 1700 burglaries in 2002. In 2003, the city introduced cameras and patrols by retired policemen, and the number of burglaries dropped to about 1,000. However, in 2006 the number went back up to 1,200, so the city officials decided to look into…
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Say “Please”
We all eat dinner together as a family, although Mayuki shows a variable amount of interest in the food on offer. I wouldn’t say that she’s picky, but what she decides to eat varies from day to day. Sometimes, she decides that she wants to be fed, and asks Yuriko or me for food. It’s…
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Shinto Controversies Course — 3rd Lecture
Yesterday, I went to the third lecture in this year’s open Shinto course at Kokugakuin University. The topic was the Sacred Marriage hypothesis. In this context, this is the claim that certain Shinto rituals originally included an act of ritual sex, as a central part of the rite. The lecturer, Professor Okada, does not believe…
My Old Pages
These are links to my old webpages, from back before I moved to a wordpress-powered blog. Back when I wrote the HTML by hand in a text editor. Yes, really. The formatting on some of the pages has broken a bit, and there are newer versions of some of the content in the current part of the site. Nothing here is maintained, nor likely to have anything done with it in the future.