Toyama Medicine

This origami cube advertises "Toyama's Medicine - 300 Years of History."

I usually don't indulge in travel souvenirs.
I take photos, but don't really need trinkets. And I am bad at finding those for other people. They always strike me as kind of chintzy. But while I was in Japan this year, I stopped at Iwase, a port town in Toyama prefecture, and found a small trinket shop with a medicine counter. As it turns out, Toyama is famous for its medicines, having a long history of powders and treatments being brought to rural customers by itinerant druggists.

A traveling drug salesman from olden times, and one from more recent times.

I fell in love with the package design of these slim envelopes, and Tomoko suggested I buy some - as a souvenir. I couldn't resist, and once committed to the idea, could not limit myself to only a few. So I picked up about $50 worth of medicines that I will never use - headache powders, stomach relief, and what all else I don't even know. But the art on these is so nice I wanted to put them up here for people to see.


They remind me a little bit of Polish movie posters - which I have written about on this blog before. This is product design without the boring constrictions so typical in the US. I know a lot of people don't think much about advertising, but I work in that industry, and trust me, the people who make it often think too much about it. Which is part of the reason why I think it tends to look so uniform and uninteresting. Avoiding photography and choosing instead to go with an entirely hand-painted approach automatically contributes more life to these designs. But I also love their color palettes, text treatments, and the depictions of masks, demons and devils.



After displaying these packets proudly to Tomoko's mother, she told me that the tradition of traveling drug salesmen continues to this day in Toyama. She pulled a plastic pill box down from atop her refrigerator and showed several packages of her own. She explained that the box was left stocked in each home, and when the salesman returned he deducted what was used from the box and presented a bill for it. In some of the rural areas of Gifu, south of her house, I could definitely see this kind of service being useful, but in the suburbs of Toyama it was mostly just an interesting holdover from an earlier time.

I might have looked a little strange in the drug shop, a foreigner with a camera around my neck, ogling the merchandise, but I was probably the biggest customer for headache powders all that week.

The Heat is Back

Two months since last post. I don't know how many years since last confession.
Summer officially began yesterday - June 21. With it came the heat. The heat may have arrived a little earlier actually, but I have been putting in long shifts in an air-conditioned building all week, so I wouldn't really know the difference.
It was 97 yesterday. Feels about the same today.
Here's to hoping the power doesn't blow, as it did 5 consecutive days last year. ( I think DWP finally upgraded all the equipment for this street ).

In other news - my old domain is gone. This blog is now hosted on blogspot.com
rivas-splicer.com is property of ICDsoft until 2009 - bastards. If you register a domain through them, you are actually subletting. They own it for another year after you let it go. Makes it harder to switch services. Still, since all of my content is now being hosted on free servers (the future - no, the present state - of non-commercial internet use), I could not justify paying $60/year for hosting anymore.

In other other news - all my old video editing equipment has been sold off (finally) and the money has promptly disappeared into the newest hobby - photography. Picked up a used Canon 30D before the Japan trip in April (pictures of which are uploaded here and here). Just picked up two 580EX II flash units. Ny next goal is to learn studio lighting with the flash units - and also start using them outdoors - kinda the way trained commercial photographers do. Flickr has been an inspiration. You can learn a lot by seeing so much great work for free in one place. Now let's see if I can actually learn it-learn it... opening your eyes to something is one thing. Applying it is another.

Got a bootlegged copy of an old British Hammer studios horror film called Maniac, or The Maniac. (Not to be confused with the 1980s film with Joe Spinell). A blow-torch killer movie. Yow. Kerwin Matthews from Sinbad.

Returned to reading Gore Vidal's Lincoln. Gave it up in 2006 because of stuff interrupting my life. Now I'm fascinated with Civil War era history. Lincoln was reviled by many when he took office. Assassination was threatened before he was sworn in. He imprisoned rebels without trial. He took 2 million from the Treasury for the war without approval from Congress. He confiscated communications from telegraph offices in an attempt to intercept rebel transmissions, not unlike the current NSA wiretapping program. There was no income tax prior to the Civil War. There was no currency issued by the US government - there were many currencies issued by over 3000 independent banks, making counterfeiting a rampant problem.

I am hungry for waffles. I need to brave the heat and take a subway ride to Hollywood and Vine to get some waffles and visit the bookstore.

People are bitching about gas prices. It's currently about $4.70/gallon. Never thought we'd see it. In 2000, I was buying gas in Van Nuys for $0.96/gallon. They tell us we've always had it easy in the US. People want their freedom to drive. So we don't use public transport and don't conserve. This is the "freedom" we are fighting for.

PS - domestic drilling, hydrogen, biofuels, and hybrids are paying lip service to rising prices and global temperatures.
Hybrids get the same MPG as economy cars from 10 years ago. Hydrogen requires enormous energy to produce. Biofuels can wreak havoc on agriculture. Drilling and exploration destroy the environment.
People should realize that fully electric cars already provide the speed and range they require. Most people do not travel over 100 miles per day. If we embrace them, they'll get better and cheaper. And we can start producing more of our electricity from renewable sources. Why are we putzing around? Someone needs to start kicking asses on this.

End of rant.