Mutantfrog Travelogue
Photos, Stories and articles on East Asia



Visa experts? (May 7)
A friend of mine emailed me the following question, and since I don’t actually have a clue I thought I would toss it out here, for people who actually know to take a stab at it. A friend of mine in Tokyo (hes there until may, but may be going back later this year) may have [...]


Brief update. (May 7)
So I haven’t posted anything here in well over a month, in fact since before I left home to come once again to Kyoto. In short, here is what has been going on: Came to Kyoto University as an auditing “research student” on Japanese government scholarship in the History of Education division of the Faculty of [...]


Free Aung San Suu Kyi Free Free! (May 2)
As part of Tokyo’s Earth Day festivities last weekend, author/rapper Seiko Ito held a poetry reading set to techno music, dedicated to the message of setting Burma free from tyranny. From the Burma Info website: In the following video clip of the performance, Ito can be seen reading his statement, demanding that the military regime stop [...]


Burmese pop! (Apr 8)
A large catalog with flash video and downloadable mp3s.


How does a samurai kill a duck? (Apr 7)
I’m sure you can visualize many possibilities in your head, but if you go to Hamarikyu Gardens in Tokyo you can get an idea of how the shôgun did it back in the day. The general process sounds like it belongs in an ethnic joke book: Build a pond and a creek. Raise ducks in the pond. Hide [...]


Surprise! you are now a part of the ?Metabolic Syndrome Market? (Apr 6)
Thomas Jefferson famously said, “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” As cliche as it’s become, the quote still rings very true to me as an avid newspaper and online news consumer. Even today, it is very easy for those following the news to get [...]


Back to Kyoto (Apr 1)
Anyone reading carefully over the past couple of weeks would have figured this out, but I never said quite specifically. Tomorrow I will be flying back to Japan, and living once again in Kyoto. This time I will be studying again, but instead of as an exchange student or employee at Ritsumeikan University (what I [...]


Taiwan gets a little bit more modern (Mar 31)
From The Taipei Times: A ban on poultry slaughter in traditional markets will take effect on Tuesday as originally scheduled, National Science Council Chairman Chen Chien-jen (???) said yesterday. “Despite protests by poultry vendors who fear that the ban will affect their livelihood, the policy will go into effect on April 1, and all chicken, geese [...]


Linky Desktop (Mar 30)
As I am about to permanently disassemble this computer and bring only the hard drives with me to Japan, where I will then assemble a new system after finding a place to live, I figure it would be a good time to post the various things that had been sitting around my desktop in case [...]


Wordpress 2.5 (Mar 29)
I just upgraded the blog to the brand new Wordpress 2.5 codebase. This is a major software update, so if anyone sees any odd behavior (particularly that wasn’t there before) please drop me an email.