Tokyo Traffic Accident Reports

One of the things I always get asked when taking foreigners on their first trip around Tokyo is the numbers and figures put up on all police boxes around the city. I am sure you have seen them if you have been in Tokyo, the traffic accident reports of the previous day. Here is a larger “monument” in Hibiya showing the number of fatalities in traffic accidents in the metropolitan area the day before, zero. The last photo is from the side of a police box (a koban) in Omotesando, showing the fairly average numbers of zero fatalities and 120 injuries. Not bad considering that the city has almost 13 million residents and twice that again during the daytime. Japanese are big on reducing traffic accidents and several times a year they have special traffic accident awareness weeks where volunteers do their best to make people act more safely in traffic.

To The Playground and Back – Transporting Kids

How do you take ten kids from an inner city kindergarten to a play ground safely, with only two teachers? The Japanese have a way that I haven’t seen in any other country so far, the push cart! Here’s two teachers in Kyoto in front of the Heian Jingu taking their little students to enjoy a bit of play time. Most kindergartens in bigger Japanese cities are very small compared to western ones so most of the smaller kindergartens take the kids to local parks. It’s supposed to be autumn but this morning in Kyoto was hot like summer.

Going Home – Otemachi

Been busy with life stuff recently, and besides, several posts these last two weeks have been over twelve photos strong, so maybe I can be excused for slowing down just a little? Here’s a snapshot I took in early May this year. A man, probably on his way home by the main road in front of the Imperial Palace here in central Tokyo. You can barely hint one of the imperial gates in the far distance. May was an interesting time to be here in Japan. Hopefully we will live in less interesting times for a few decades from here on.

It’s kind of unusual with these open spaces here in Tokyo. I took this with my 85mm lens, not normally used for anything other than portraits, but it gives this street scene a kind of compressed look.