Categories
History

Heike crab

I read at lostinjapan.info an interesting article that remind me how much I liked the “Heike´s crab” history when I read Cosmos from Carl Sagan.

“The Heike crab” or “the samurai crab” is famous because it looks like samurai warriors from the beginnings of last millenium. As Carl Sagan explains in his book, Heike clan warriors lost everything in a decisive battle against the Genji. That battle was on 1185 near Japanese coaste. Most of the corpses stayed for long around the beaches where the battle occurred.

Local fishermen living started believing that the spirits from those dead Heike warriors were living inside crabs that had some similarities with a human face. An artificial selection process was triggered because fishermen were returning those human-like crabs to the sea and eating “normal” crabs. Doing that for centuries “created” not only human-face crabs but even Heike-samurai-face crabs! And of course, those are the ones who survive.


Heike warrior’s face.

Non-scientific explanation, the fishermen’s legend says that those crabs are real Heike warriors transformed. There are eve traditional Japanese fold tales where crab armies return to fight against the Genji. Next ukiyo-e paint represents some Heike phantom ships and Heike crabs attacking the Genji army.

If you wanna listen Carl Sagan’s explanation that is better than mine, watch next video:

Categories
Advertising

Countdown

Microsoft Japan is doing his best preparing Windows Vista launch. They put a bit Windows logo with a countdown clock at 109, one of the most famous department stores in Japan.

Apple Japan counterattack is a funny TV add where one guy is supposed to be Windows and the other one MacOSX , during the cm the Windows guy stops talking from time to time because he is supposed to be rebooting the system.

Categories
Books

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” is the last book I read from Haruki Murakami, my favorite writer. “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” its a compilation of short histories that he wrote since 1980 till nowadays. Reading this book you’ll get a sense of Haruki’s trajectory and style changes through time. Some of the short histories included in this book were used later to create full size novels like Norwegian Wood.

Some paragraphs extracted from the book that I liked:

“Do you like music?” she asked me.
“I do if it´s nice music in a nice world”, I said.
“In a nice world there is no nice music”, she said, as if revealing some deep secret. “In a nice world the air doesn´t vibrate”.

She waited for the train to pass. Then she said, ‘I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is guess from waht comes floating to the surface every once in a while.’

Haruki Murakami can be considered one of the most internationalized Japaneses writers and is one of the best japanese candidades for next Nobel Prize contest. Next Haruki’s book After Dark can be pre-ordered from Amazon, and will be on sale sometime this year.