2014 FUKUSHIMA BUIDING BRIDGES TOUR PREPARATION PART ONE: FUKUSHIMA MON AMOUR Our 2nd Japan Tour will take us to Saitama, Minamisōma, Iwaki, Kōriyama, Kakogawa, Nagoya, and Tokyo. Minamisōma, Iwaki and Kōriyama are three places in the Fukushima prefecture, at distances as close as 25 km from the nuclear disaster plant. During and after our…

INTRODUCTION Here is our 2014 Japan "Building Bridges" Tour Blog. This year we decided to take things a little easier during the first few days. There is some organizing and preparing to be done for the second week of our tour: the trip to Fukushima and the subsequent concerts in Kakogawa and Nagoya will be…

FUKUSHIMA DIARY     22nd March MINAMISOMA Up at 3.30 in the morning. Taxi is due for 4.30. Haruko's parents get up as well, to make coffee and to wish us "ganbatte" on our trip. We take all our stuff outside (we've left most of the luggage and the bass at Dolce yesterday) and we…

KAKOGAWA INTERLUDE 25th March URAWA Today i'm in Urawa, in a department store named Parco. Haruko has stayed home with her parents for the morning. I find a nice coffee shop on the 3rd floor, where i'm greeted with a series of those inimitable and interminable irasshaimasèèèèèèèèèèè's. I get a drink at the counter and…

  NAGOYA The next morning we have breakfast with the students and Mr. and Mrs. Hasegawa and Gen-kun, their youngest son. Gen means "string". He's a wonderful little boy, always happy and smiling as if he were a little Buddha himself.   After breakfast we're taken to the train station where we board the train…

Under construction... TOKYO We get up at 6 again and we meet Tobias at the station. His hotel is next to the rail tracks. Today we experience Japanese rush hour. It's exactly like what one sees on TV. There are a thousand people on the platform, and in the train itself we're packed and stacked…

NARITA / EPILOGUE 1st APRIL Last night i had terrible nightmares about having to take the early morning train with the bass. Our rush-hour experience yesterday had been special, to say the least. I have to drop off the bass at Narita Airport today, and there are only two Narita Express trains per day that…

DUO SWEET 17 JAPAN TOUR BLOG 2013 (We wish to thank the Flemish Government for its financial aid in partly covering the costs of airplane and train tickets, and the Osaka Flanders Centre for their contribution which enabled us to donate the entire proceeds of our Urawa concert to an institution that takes care of…