Walking through a temple in Jiyugaoka last week, I came across this old man making brooms. These old twig/straw brooms are still in common use all over Japan, particularly for outdoor and garden sweeping jobs. Those hideous leaf blowers that are so popular in Australia, shattering weekend calm with random industrial noises (along with whipper-snippers [the rest of you call them weed wackers I think] and lawn mowers) are relatively unheard of here, thank god.

Suburbs in Japan are relatively free of those kinds of weekend sufferences (sometimes no gardens can be a good thing) - instead we get the recyle truck crawling through the lanes with it's pretty song and almost unintelligible recorded message, or the Tofu seller pushing his cart and blowing his tell-tale pipe, or the vegetable seller blaring his presence through lo-quality loudhailers. At least these things just crawl by and then disappear in the distance, to be quickly forgotten.