月: 2025年7月

Today I went to Niigata because I wanted my ID photo. Actually, I had tried to take my photo by myself with my digital camera. But it was so difficult to make my photo a good one with right lighting, straight direction of face, and good color contrast. I wasted more than two hours yesterday and I gave up the idea to take my photo by myself. So today, I went to a photo studio in Niigata. The studio told me to wait for 30 minutes for processing my photo.

The outside, under the summer sunshine, was too hot. But I walked to Bandai area of the downtown Niigata. An idea came to my mind and that was to go to the observatory in the nearby tall building. There is a 20-story building which is also an office of the famous local newspaper company. I remembered that there was an observatory at the top of the building. I thought it was good to kill thirty minutes.

There is a tall building in the photo above. That building also has an observatory. I have been there several times. The observatory has a good view from south-west to north. But you cannot get good view from North east to south.

You see a tall building with sharp triangle roof on top. That building also has an observatory. But the view from there is limited only from north to South. You cannot see the west. That means you cannot enjoy the view of the sea and Sado island on the west. Actually, if you are male, you could see them by going to men’s restroom. I am a man, so I am not sure whether or not female people can see the west through toilet window. If they can’t, I think it is clearly one of sexual discrimination against women because man can get ocean view while women can’t.

Today’s my conclusion is that the best observatory in the downtown Niigata is where I went to today. It is on the 20^th floor of the “Mediaship” building in Bandai area. The second best is of Toki Messe. If you want to take a good picture of Shinano River, Toki Messe is better than Mediaship.

Mr. Shinzo Abe was a politician of Japan. And I should say I didn’t like him at all. Anything he did and said was against my belief and political preferences. But I think he should not have died in that way. He was shot dead by a handmade gun about three years ago.

Two weeks ago, I found his photo on an old newspaper dated on July 11, 2019. Since I was going to quit my job and come back Japan, I was cleaning my room. At that time, I had already finished grading my students for the semester and had registered the scores on the university system. In order to leave the residence, I needed to throw many things as much as I could so that I could pack my stuff into two suitcases and one bag.

Old newspaper is sometime useful to wrap a fragile stuff. But there were many newspaper. I just thought throwing them as trash. And then found Mr. Abe’s photo between the pages. At first, I thought I would throw the page with other pages, but I changed my mind. Even though I didn’t like him, I wanted to take his photo back to Japan with me. Just one page of newspaper wouldn’t increase weight of my suitcase; it’s just a few gram. So, I folded the page and put it into one of my suitcases.

Since two suitcases are too heavy to carry by myself from Narita Airport to my house in Niigata, I asked a shipping company “Kuroneko Yamato” to deliver them. I received them three days ago. I opened one, and found Mr. Abe’s photo again.