WMF Journal
March 14, 2012
One Year After the Japan Earthquake: A Journey, Part III
Posted by Henry Tzu Ng, Executive Vice President
Kesennuma is a historic fishing port sited at the mouth of a scenic bay that opens to the ocean. It is among the top 5 fishing towns in Japan and the daily catches of its fishermen find their way to the famed Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo. Until recent times, the city was Japan's busiest port for processing bonito and swordfish.
Read moreMarch 13, 2012
One Year After the Japan Earthquake: A Journey, Part II
Posted by Henry Tzu Ng, Executive Vice President
While not well visited by foreigners, this isolation is one of the reasons Japanese treasure this area—rural, agricultural, isolated— “the old Japan” —not only scenically, but in terms of the agrarian pace of life and a real landscape of snow covered mountains and trees that we see as we whisk by in our car. To the left are the Ōu Mountains, the longest mountain range in Japan dotted with age-old volcanoes and stretching 311 miles south from Aomori Prefecture to the Nasu volcanoes at the northern boundary of the Kantō region. These dramatic, high, snow covered mountains, with the highest peak around 6,700 feet—popular with skiers—accompany us for a long part of our drive. This terrain is “typical Tohoku” and unlike most of Japan. It has a refreshing alpine quality, and so different from the heavily tourist travelled areas, especially those south of Tokyo that are dense with modern urban cities strung together along the rail lines.
Read moreMarch 12, 2012
One Year After the Japan Earthquake: A Journey, Part I
Posted by Henry Tzu Ng, Executive Vice President
The fishing port of Kesennuma on the border of Miyagi and Iwate prefectures on the east coast of Japan was heavily damaged in the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the Tohoku area of Japan in March 2011. Images of huge fishing boats that were swept up by the tsunami waves and thrown inland and images of the spilled fuel from the town's fishing fleet that burned for four days were some of the mostly widely published photos of the disaster.
Read moreMarch 9, 2012
Stobi Looks to the Future
Posted by Yiannis Avramides, Program Associate
In December I visited Stobi, an archaeological site that is included on the 2012 World Monuments Watch. My hosts were Silvana Blaževska, the director of National Institution Stobi, and Goce Pavlovski, a staff archaeologist who gave me an information-packed tour of the ancient city. Last year, the institution nominated the site to the World Monuments Watch to draw international attention to the opportunities for conserving and interpreting this site.
Read moreMarch 6, 2012
Taking advantage of vacationing in Poland during Thanksgiving week in 2011, I made it a point to visit a number of sites in the country that had been listed on the World Monuments Watch over time. Some, like Prozna Street, I had been to before and frequently. Others were totally new to me. My goal was to visit St. Paraskewa’s Church in Radruż, which is on the 2012 World Monuments Watch.
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