Japan Photo Journal: 'Ghost mushroom's' pure white flowers bloom at Nara Pref. shrine
Pure white "ginryoso" flowers, or Monotropastrum humile, bloom among fallen leaves at Oomiwa Jinja shrine in Sakurai, Nara Prefecture, on April 22, 2025. They have begun to bloom in various spots on the Shinto shrine grounds, and are apparently expected to be at their best until around the end of April. Ginryoso is a saprophytic plant in the heath family that grows to a height of 10 to 20 centimeters. It is also referred to in Japanese as "yurei-dake," literally meaning ghost mushroom, due to its appearance. A shrine spokesperson commented, "We want visitors to enjoy discovering these quietly blooming, delicate flowers."
(Japanese original by Yasuyoshi Mochizuki, Sakurai Local Bureau)
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Kyodo News
32 minutes ago
- Kyodo News
Princess Kako meets people of Japanese descent in Brazil nursing home
KYODO NEWS - 26 minutes ago - 18:35 | All, Japan, World Japan's Princess Kako, a niece of Emperor Naruhito, visited a nursing home near Sao Paulo on Saturday to interact with locals of Japanese descent, as part of her official visit to Brazil to commemorate this year's 130th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Welcomed by the residents of the facility, which houses migrants from Japan and their descendants, the 30-year-old younger daughter of Crown Prince Fumihito and Crown Princess Kiko asked how they are doing and called on them to look after themselves. Established in 1958 as the first nursing facility for the Japanese community, it is home to some 60 people aged from their 60s to 100. The daughter of Japanese immigrants, 92-year-old Chizue Yuasa handed the princess a bouquet of flowers, while Koki Kumada, a 93-year-old migrant, expressed his excitement at meeting the imperial member. "I'm happy that she came all the way to Brazil. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance, I was deeply moved," said Kumada, who used to work at a coffee farm in the state of Sao Paulo. Brazil is home to the largest Japanese community outside Japan, with about 2.7 million people living there. The first group of Japanese immigrants arrived in Brazil in 1908 under a government policy at the time to encourage emigration in the wake of an economic downturn and a growing population. But many died due to the harsh living conditions and exposure to malaria. Princess Kako arrived in Sao Paulo on Thursday, kicking off her nearly two-week long trip that will take her to a total of eight cities in Brazil, including the capital Brasilia and Rio de Janeiro. "I express my deep honor to immigrants from Japan and their descendants who have carried on every day despite facing various difficulties, and contributed to Brazilian society," she said during a welcome ceremony on Friday in Sao Paulo in front of some 1,000 people from the Japanese community. After her visit to the nursing home on Saturday, the princess visited a school that many Japanese-Brazilians attend and watched students perform traditional Brazilian dances. She also interacted with young people who are learning Japanese and have visited Japan at her hotel. Related coverage: Japan's Princess Kako leaves for Brazil to mark 130 years of ties Japan's former Princess Mako gives birth to 1st child Princess Aiko to make 1st official overseas visit in Nov. to Laos
The Mainichi
10 hours ago
- The Mainichi
Edging Toward Japan 62: In Search of a Japan of cool summers and light nights
There is a curious historical footnote that tends to be forgotten about the Japanese imperial expansion of the late 19th and early 20th century -- largely remembered today as a remorseless expansion westwards and southwards over the Asian continent. It's easy to overlook the fact that there was also a small northern component of this expansion resulting in Japan wresting control for quite a long historical period of part of the island of Sakhalin, in modern day Russia. From 1905 until 1945, the Japanese administered the southern part -- and from 1918 to 1925 the entirety -- of this often overlooked island, meaning that you could travel all the way up the archipelago from the southern tip of Taiwan to the northern tip of Sakhalin without ever leaving Japanese jurisdiction. The Japanese colony on Sakhalin was called "Karafuto" and its third Director General was a man called Hiraoka Sadataro, who also happened to be the novelist Yukio Mishima's paternal grandfather. "Karafuto" is now a land pretty much lost to history, a piece of modern-day Russia that was once Japanese, but sounds like some fantasy landscape such as the imaginary country of Ihatov dreamt up in the 1920s by the Tohoku writer Kenji Miyazawa. The real Karafuto however was not a dreamscape, but a place sometimes bitterly fought over for its raw materials (timber, petroleum and fishing) with native peoples and bonded labourers moved around like chess pieces to make way for imperial ambitions. Karafuto popped up in my mind the other day when I was idly dreaming of a Japan that did not suffer from ever more brutally oppressive summers. Imagine a Japan, I was thinking, which you could visit in summer and where the days were long and the weather tolerably cool, how magical that would be. And then I realised that the fantasy cool-and-summery Japan must only be located in the lost geographical landscape of Karafuto. People often ask me about visiting Japan in the summer and I am often stuck for an answer. I realize that many people enjoy the rituals of a Japanese summer -- the clatter of yukata and geta, the hiss of the cicada, the fireworks, the festivals, the kawadoko (riverside) dining by the Kamo river in Kyoto. Many people visit Japan in summer and have a wonderful time. But as someone constitutionally incapable of handling the heat and humidity, Japan in summer is not for me. If I spent my summers in Japan, I would spend my entire time indoors, huddled up close to an air conditioner. I've been religiously avoiding Japanese summers since that of 1990, when I nearly dissolved in a sweaty puddle into the sheets in my unairconditioned 6-tatami-mat room in a boarding house in the Uzumasa area of Kyoto. Since then, I have rarely made an appearance in Japan in July or August. In fact, as the years have rolled on, and Japan's summers have got ever hotter, I have now also marked the months of June and September on my "Avoid" list. This is all decidedly inconvenient. Because it just happens that the months of June to September are also the time of year when I have the greatest opportunity to visit Japan with my school age children. I have often thought how we might square this circle. I've investigated temperatures in the traditional places of retreat from the summer heat like Karuizawa and Hakone, but they are still too hot for me. Hokkaido is more distant, but even if I trekked that far north, it still wouldn't be cool enough and would leave me dreaming of spending August like the British Royal Family in the Highlands of Scotland. It's a dilemma not being able to visit the country you most want to go at the time of year when you have the most time. So after looking up temperatures on the far periphery of Hokkaido, my eye looked out even further north on the map and I began to wonder if the Japanese gained possession (currently disputed) from the Russians of the Kuril Islands in the far north whether I might then have a suitably cool Japanese destination to visit in summer. Or I found myself dreaming of Sakhalin and half-regretting that the Japanese ever lost their colony there, which would have been quite perfect for my constitution. The controversial journalist Graham Hancock has been promoting for many decades the idea that at the end of the last Ice Age an advanced civilization, having found their native land unliveable due to radical climate change and rapidly increasing sea levels, took to their boats and headed off to new lands. I'm wondering if one day the Japanese will, by common consensus, proclaim their traditional homeland simply too hot to live in anymore and take to their boats and start again somewhere a lot cooler. They might do a deal on some uninhabited chunk of northern landmass and restart their civilization there, a remaking of "Karafuto" for those who simply can't hack the heat and humidity any more. @DamianFlanagan (This is Part 61 of a series) In this column, Damian Flanagan, a researcher in Japanese literature, ponders about Japanese culture as he travels back and forth between Japan and Britain. Profile: Damian Flanagan is an author and critic born in Britain in 1969. He studied in Tokyo and Kyoto between 1989 and 1990 while a student at Cambridge University. He was engaged in research activities at Kobe University from 1993 through 1999. After taking the master's and doctoral courses in Japanese literature, he earned a Ph.D. in 2000. He is now based in both Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, and Manchester. He is the author of "Natsume Soseki: Superstar of World Literature" (Sekai Bungaku no superstar Natsume Soseki).
Japan Today
a day ago
- Japan Today
Princess Kako receives medal in Brazil
Princess Kako meets with Sao Paulo Gov Tarcisio de Freitas at the Bandeirantes Palace in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on Friday. By SAO PAULO Japan's Princess Kako, a niece of Emperor Naruhito, received the highest order of Brazil's state of Sao Paulo on Friday during her 10-day 11-day trip to the South American nation. Her trip also marks the 130th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries. The younger daughter of Crown Prince Fumihito and Crown Princess Kiko arrived on Thursday in Sao Paulo. She held appointments with members of the Japanese community on Friday and finished her schedule at a dinner with Governor Tarcisio de Freitas at the state government palace. She was awarded the Order of the Ipiranga at a closed ceremony. Princess Kako is welcomed to the Bunkyo Brazilian Society of Japanese Culture in Sao Paulo on Friday. Image: AP/Andre Penner Princess Kako will visit another seven cities, including Rio de Janeiro and capital Brasilia, where she is expected to meet President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Speaking to de Freitas, she made reference to the first Japanese immigrants arriving in the city of Santos in 1908 after a gruesome trip through the seas. On the first day of her trip, she visited the memorial to pioneer Japanese immigrants at Sao Paulo's Ibirapuera Park. 'I felt that the immigrants made an enormous effort to adapt to Brazil, and still today are very active in different areas. The fact that Brazil sheltered the Japanese community made the connections between the two countries to become deeper,' the princess said. Today, Brazil has the largest population of people of Japanese descent in the world, estimated at about 2.7 million. About half of those live in Sao Paulo state, official figures show. Emperor Naruhito has no male children, which makes his brother Akishino, Princess Kako's father, the first successor in line. Japan's tradition does not allow women to take the throne. Princess Mako, who is Princess Kako's older sister, was the last member of Japan's imperial family to visit Brazil. She traveled to 13 cities of the South American nation in 2018. © 025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
