The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at USJ...

Halloween is over here in Japan.  It's a rainy November 1st.  For me, November 1st has traditionally been one of those let-down days.  I remember waking up after the Halloween revelry if it took place on a school night and trudging up the street to the bus stop.  Festive decorations in creepy black, orange, green and purple still hung from doors and sometimes there would be crumpled candy wrappers in the gutters along the curbs mixed in with the dead brown leaves.  You anticipate, participate, then have to get on with your life with all the sounds and sights of that one magical night of the year playing on an imaginary loop inside your mind.

Between the pure fun of Halloween and the familial warmth of Thanksgiving and the Christmas season is just blah November nothingness.  Maybe you get to watch the Peanuts Thanksgiving special if you're not studying for a test, but Peppermint Patty bawling out Charlie Brown for serving popcorn and toast on a ping pong table in the backyard doesn't have the same mystic hold on the imagination as the Linus' Great Pumpkin evangelizing and "I got a rock."

Anyway, don't let my post-holiday depression get you down.  After all, we had a fantastic Halloween month and I'm not through sharing some of the photographic memories of what we did.  Yes, it's the long-awaited flood of Wizarding World of Harry Potter photos on my Let's Look at Japan blog.  I took them with my iPhone, which handles low-light conditions better than my Fuji digital camera, but they're still not great.  In the immortal words of Dr. Egon Spengler, "I blame myself."

The Wizarding World of Harry Potter is a fun place to spend a few hours and I hope at least a little of that comes through in my lousy photographs.

Halloween twilight at USJ...

I added 10 more USJ photos to my Let's Look at Japan Tumblr.  You can see some sedate late afternoon shots of people having a relaxing fun time, a stupid photo of me trying to get into Doc Brown's famous Delorean time machine from Back to the Future (the Osaka park Delorean is a reproduction, I believe, but with a few movie-used parts for authenticity) and then the start of one of the Street Zombie attacks.  Since the lighting was disorienting and I'm somewhat thick, I missed photographing the actual simulated violence.  I like the colors in what is otherwise one very lousy photograph, though.

Next up:  The Wizarding World of Harry Potter!

Let's Look at Japan this Halloween (and forever after)!

I take some of the world's worst photographs and now I'm going to share them with you.  Japan is a wonderful place to look at and everyone interested should do so.  To help make this possible, I've started a terrible new photo blog on Tumblr and I call it "Let's Look at Japan!" 

The first few entries will celebrate Halloween in Japan with a lot of shots from our recent visit to USJ in Osaka (if you've never been, I highly recommend you go during October), but after that I'll be posting whatever catches my eye.  And I'll share some of it here instead of just commenting on Japan Today stories the way I've been doing lately.  Although I'll do that, too.

Here's a sample of the kind of visual torture you can expect (I don't mean what's in the image... these three characters are adorable and I love their Halloween costumes... I mean my crappy photog skills):