Enoshima

  • Fujisan Farewell Lights Up The Year’s End

    Fortune gave me a delightful end to 2025 with an unexpected night flight to Enoshima to see the Jewel of Shonan illumination event. We still made it home in time to farewell the year with the traditional Red and White Year-end Song Festival…at least partway, as I couldn’t be bothered and went to bed. Having been incapacitated for months due to a broken leg, I wasn’t expecting to head out, especially I only stopped using crutches on Dec. 26, gave short shrift to a cane the following day and then limped around under my own steam thereafter. But Mrs. Kangaeroo, who delights in the usually spectacular winter illumination events around…

  • Isle Idyll

    On our sole shared, obligation-free holiday over the 2025 new year period, Mrs. Kangaeroo and I headed off for a day out to a nearby island. We headed to Enoshima, a short trip from our home and site of the sailing competitions for the 1964 and 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games. One intention was to pay a new year’s shrine visit, which is a customary Japanese tradition. Another was to enjoy the ocean. My new year hadn’t been the greatest. On Boxing Day, I bent over to pat Oreo, a neighborhood border collie, and my back went on me. It remains fiercely painful now. And my foot that has been niggling…

  • Arrows of Outrageous Fortune

    Mrs. Kangaeroo invited me out on a date today, which turned out to be an absolute ripper (how could any event with Mrs. Kangaeroo not be?), but involved horses, of course! Mrs. Kangaeroo is an avid equestrian and her devotion, best seen when it comes to living and providing loving care, extends to her encyclopedic knowledge of horse-related events going on at any one time in Japan. And she let me know that we were going to be watching a display of yabusame, horseback-mounted archery, on the beach at Enoshima, a small island and tourist attraction about 50 km south of central Tokyo. Horses don’t really do it for me….