Recent Comments

@Ted T.: It was something truly special, wasn’t it! I can just imagine how it must have awed people when it was first built. I first saw the Amarube Bridge in the early 1980s. I never crossed it. Just saw it from below and wondered if it could withstand a strong earthquake…

@Deborah Skuse: Thank you for sharing your family history. What a terrible experience. Your grandmother must have been deeply traumatized.

Mike Gutierrez: I am glad you like this article, Mike. I really enjoyed researching it. It completely changed how I look at images of children with younger kids on their back. Many were shot for the tourism trade and paint a romantic image. The truth however was far from idyllic.

Did you get a chance to read the other three articles in this series? If not, you can find the links at the top of this article.

@Mike Gutierrez: Yes, they reminded me of Hollywood glam shots as well. Very likely, the photographer was inspired by that style.

@Suzanne Temple: Haha! And I thought that some thirty years as an investigative journalist had hardened me into a cynical cold realist…

@Ben G: Thanks for sharing this, Ben.

Experts do not seem to agree on how and when itadakimasu became common. Buddhist monks may have started using it many centuries ago. But research suggests that the custom only became common around the 1930s. Japanese author, scholar, and folklorist Kunio Yanagita (柳田國男, 1875–1962) mentioned this in Everyday Words (1946, reprinted in The Complete Works of Yanagita Kunio, Volume 15, 1998).

In a research project partially done by the National Museum of Ethnology in the 1980s, in which 284 people were surveyed about the term, the militarist period of the 1930s was also highlighted as the start of the custom.

@Ben G: Thank you for sharing. I was not familiar with Turkish bath customs. Hammam shoes, like the ones in your link, are absolutely gorgeous.

@Noel: Thank you very much for sharing, Noel. I was wondering if you meant this one. You are lucky to have this print in your collection!

@Noel: Thank you, Noel. I really like the photo of the Osaka Hotel in the collection of the Nagasaki University Library. It clearly shows the two architectures standing side by side.

I would love to see the photo in your collection which shows the bridge.

@Noel: Yes, in that case you are absolutely right. Bird’s-eye view photographs from before the era of powered aviation are exceedingly rare. Some shots were made from balloons, others from mountains. But there were few balloons and no mountains in Osaka.