10 Japanese mythical heroes

There are plenty of interesting mythical heroes in Kojiki, the book of Japanese legends.

We show ten of our favourite Japanese mythical heroes and expect to hear about yours.

My personal favourite is Ame no Uzume, the dancer goddess.

She danced the first recorded strip-tease in Japan and all the male gods adored it.

She did it not because she wanted some finacial rewards as her modern-day counterparts do, but because she was asked to save the world.

(Please read the  Kojiki article for what happened and why she needed to take off her clothes in front of lewd gods)

Later, she married Sarutahiko, the monkey god.

He is a distant cousin of Hanuman of India and Son Goku of China.

The couple is guardian deities of arts in Japan.

ASAKUSA Underground wants to write more about them along with other funny and interesting Japanese mythical heroes.

We want to show your favourite mythical heroes, too.

(Some English translation of Kojiki are available on the net. Read the stories and please write to us.)

Japanese myths

How do you teach young children your cultural heritage?

Sometimes legends are not compatible to our modern-day morals and common senses.

They can be provocative and lewd.

Do you distort the original and tell them a diluted version of it?

When I think about Kojiki, the oldest book of legends in Japan, it is inevitable to ask myself whether it is possible to tell those interesting stories without referring libidinous elements.

For example, about the scene of Ama no Iwato (Heaven's Cavern), is it really funny if you just tell that a goddess danced in front of other gods and they laughed?

Why did they laugh?

Was the way she danced so comic?

In fact, the Japanese goddess performed the first recorded strip-tease in the history of Japan.

When she took off her tunic, those Oriental counterparts of Dionysos laughed like a lewd man in front of a Tifana table-dancer.

That is the whole point of it.

Sacredness and libido are inseparable in Japanese art.

A long wait

I know one should not be frustrated, but how do you help being impatient?

Now our site is placed page rank 4, but the robot of the search engine has not crawled it yet. Our new entries have not yet listed in the search engine. We have not seen a major change at our site analyser, either.

Site management teaches us a lot about Zen.

Do not expect. If yes, it will be counter-productive.

Just be patient and wait. Wait till it happens naturally.

Meanwhile we have started our new project. 

This time we carefully choose the name of the site, referencing a key word analyser.

Let's see what will happen.

Page Rank 4

Finally we made it, but we don't know what it really means.
Yesterday the world best search engine granted our Asakusa Underground a rank 4.
Since we started our site last March, we hadn't had our page rank.
We thought that one could improve his rank step by step.
First one gets rank 1 and moves up to 2, then 3.
Eventually he is accepted the class of big league players, 4+.
That was what we thought, but in reality it is not like that.
One day you wake up, and, voila!, you are in the major league of Internet.
It feels fantastic.
We are very grateful to the people who supported us, especially the site owners who placed the link to our site.
They didn't laugh at us though our site was an n/a. They treated us as their equal.
We must not forget that.
Soon, we hope, we will be receiving e-mails asking for reciprocal links.
We must not be haughty.
We should reach out and help them as the others helped us.
Thank you all.

Drink Bar

What do you think when you hear the word "drink"?
Then, what do you think when you hear the word "bar"?
You may think of beer, whisky, or your favorite cocktail.
In any case, it is related to alcoholic beverages.
If you pronouce the two words in a Japanese family restaurant, they do not mean alcohol at all.
It means the right to drink as much non-alocoholic drinks as you like.
Once you order a "drink bar", you can taste any soft drinks from the machines situated at a designated area. If you wish, you can try all kinds of them, and, if you please, you can drink 10 cups of hot chocolate.
Having seen the success of free coffee refill, some Japanese restaurant owners developped more genereous version of it.
That is "drink bar".