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· · · Japan
· · · · Shimane
島根 September — Canal Farewell · I suppose that’s about enough words & pictures from around Shimane prefecture. Here are a few farewell shots from the Matsue city canal-boat tour ...
島根 September — Washi in Yakumo · In 1902 a boy named Eishirou Abe was born in Yakumo, a village in Shimane; he took up the local trade, making Washi paper, and excelled; in 1968 he was designated a Living National Treasure. He died in 1985, but his workshop is still there; you can visit it, look at lots of beautiful paper, and make it yourself. Our Ruby road trip stopped there and we did those things ...
島根 September — Garden and Museum · That’s the Adachi Museum of Art, and especially its associated garden which has been voted (by an authoritative-sounding gardening magazine) the best in Japan for a half-dozen years now. Our road trip stopped there, alas for only an hour, and I took pictures ...
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島根 September — Ruby Road Trip · Our story thus far: a gaggle of gaijin are invited to hold forth at RubyWorld 2009 in a little-noticed corner of Japan. The conference was on Monday and Tuesday; Wednesday they took us on a scenic Shimane tour. Matz and Ko1 and Prof. Takeuchi came along, and I got pictures so you can too ...
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島根 September — Liking Matsue · I’ve written a lot about Tokyo and early on, I said “Tokyo doesn’t need you to like it”. Well, Matsue wants you to like it. Also, Tokyo is, by and large, butt-ugly while Matsue, by and large, isn’t ...
島根 September — Kunibiki Messe · The RubyWorld 2009 conference was held at Matsue’s own conference center, Kunibiki Messe. It’s a cool place and I couldn’t resist taking a bunch of pictures ...
島根 September — RubyWorld · The reason I went to Japan was to attend RubyWorld 2009, a conference centering around the Ruby programming language. The reason the conference was in this rather remote corner of Japan is that Matsumoto Yukihiro (known to geeks as “Matz”), the inventor of Ruby, chooses to live and work in Matsue, and the city and prefecture governments are trying to use his presence as leverage in diversifying the local economy into Open-Source software. While the conference was reasonably well-covered in the Japanese media, I’ve seen nothing in English, so I’ll try to rectify that here. With pictures ...
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島根 September — The Castle · Matsue’s number-one tourist attraction is its castle (松江城), which is absolutely worth a visit. Here are eight photographs, with diversions into ninja and programming culture. (For previous context, see 島根 September — Matsue Morning.) ...
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島根 September — Matsue Morning · I returned today from four days in Shimane prefecture (島根県); the occasion was RubyWorld Conference 2009. I came back with a few stories and a ton of pictures, so I’ll wrap the former around the latter for the next few days ...
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