Japanese

Japan: Chaos at Chitose Airport on March 11th

On March 11th, chaos was not limited on the ground. A Delta pilot approaching Tokyo was said to describe his experience in an e-mail. It was such a vivid description that his record rapidly spread across the blogosphere.

Here is an excerpt:

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Japan: Sanka, legendary gypsies living in the wild

Sometimes forgotten issues, people or stories come up from oblivion and awake something in the collective imagination. Sometimes also the protagonists in those stories become part of a legend, whose historical origins are difficult to track down.
This is more or less what happened to a group of people who are said to have lived in the remote mountains and plains of the Japanese archipelago until the 1970s. They are the Japanese gypsies or sanka [ja], written as 山家 (people of the mountains) or 山窩 (mountains nomads).

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