In the Land of the Rising Sun

Since the subtitle of my blog advertises photography, and since there's been precious little of that on here recently, I thought I'd share a few photos from this morning. Sunrise comes quite early to Hokkaido, since Japan is all one timezone with Hokkaido on the eastern end. They don't observe daylight savings time here, either, so at the summer solstice the sun will be popping over the horizon around 4:00am. I'm envisioning lots of nights camping on location to get sunrise photos. Fortunately, there are plenty of places to camp around here.

Since we're only in the first official week of spring, the sun currently rises around 5:30. This morning I rose at 4:00 for the hour walk up Mt. Sokuryozan. I met only one car on the winding road up the mountain, a minivan of teenagers with one hanging out the opened sunroof. It was surprisingly refreshing to see a group of Japanese teenagers out being a little wild. Not too wild, though. Even with J-pop blaring, the driver came down the mountain at a reasonably safe rate of speed.

I had the summit to myself. There are few things I like better than a solitary view of the world waking up.