Looking for hidden deaths in Japan's population and flu stats

Over the weekend, I took 2018-12, 2019-01 and 2019-02 death stats and compared them to 2019-12, 2020-01, 2020-02. The data comes from the JP govt [1] The results (and a copy of the source data) are are in a Google Sheet [2].

Basically the number of deaths is just too high and changes too much from year to year to see corona in there. Japan has 250k deaths in Jan and 120k in Dec and Feb. Even if they are under-reporting by a factor of 10, it would still be lost in the noise. There's no smoking gun in there and I think the excess deaths concept really only becomes useful when you have emergency medicine collapse and people start dying from all kinds of usually-treatable things. Maybe when you have good categorization and you can remove all the car crashes and cancers etc. Then you might start to see corona effects clearly but we don't have that.

The flu stats [3] were also updated today and they added 4 weeks of data instead of just one and that does look like a smoking gun to me.

To me that looks like about 100-150 deaths counted as flu above what would be expected. That's for Tokyo. Data is missing for many of the other cities. Most that have data show a drop, in line with expectations as due to everyone wearing masks and washing their hands. Why would Tokyo be different? Well it's tempting to go with a Tokyo-Olympic related conspiracy :) but maybe Tokyo has had a bigger corona problem for longer than anyone really knew. It's the biggest destination for foreigners, it's super easy to spread and contact tracing in Tokyo is a nightmare, so spread could easily happen under the radar, given the low testing we had. So the less touristy cities would be less infected and would see flu drop as it should while Tokyo saw flu replaces by corona. Also Nagoya seems to drop and then jump up, consistent with it briefly being the worst infected area. I should look at the per-prefecture graphs of corona to see if Nagoya's corona increase lines up.

So nationally it's still 100-150 tops. Maybe corona deaths were under-counted and should have been 50% higher but it's not the 5-10x smoking Howitzer that it might have been.

1 https://www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/list/81-1a.html#link05

2 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Lz71ov-DrSiLiwyUOvROzJtTmCBaHdpTXzpHj8juKAE/edit

3 https://www.niid.go.jp/niid/ja/flu-m/2112-idsc/jinsoku/1852-flu-jinsoku-7.html

Prof. Hitoshi Oshitani's lecture

This [1] (dammit, you need a username and password unless you come from a Google search, so click here [3] and then click the first result) is a long but detailed and interesting transcription of a lecture from Prof Hitoshi Oshitani, one of the expert group, a few days ago. Google translates it into fairly natural, easy to read English. In general it all seems fairly good.
There are some very surprising bits in there like the fact that they think that 80% of cases do not transmit and that 10% transmit to 1 person. This is not something I've heard anywhere (inside or outside Japan) and it implies that the remaining 10% must be transmitting a hell of lot to get us up to epidemic levels. It also seems like it would be very hard to reliably establish this when you're not testing very much.
It's unclear to me whether this 80/10/10 split is actually something that's driving testing policy. Its not that he denies that asymptomatic transmission is a problem but there's a lot of talk about what influences how infectious someone else. Given how little we know about this, I'd rather we just over-tested instead of trying to be smart.
Finally, he ends with an oblique reference to The Hammer and the Dance with a chart pulled from Thomas Pueyo's post [2]. This describes what I would love to see, a short, real lockdown to get to manageable levels (the hammer), followed by aggressive tracing, hygiene and other measures (the dance) were we try to find the best way to keep infections low and controlled. Still no concerts etc but we have a mostly normal life until a vaccine arrives. That puts us where Taiwan, South Korea etc are.
It gives me some hope that he refers to this but from everything else I've read, actual the policies have resulted in an inflatable hammer. We have already failed once at the the dance. He is calling for increased testing but others are still saying no that. Without that the dance will fall apart again.

1 https://www.m3.com/open/iryoIshin/article/759517/

2 https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56
3 https://www.google.com/search?q=%E3%80%8C3%E3%81%A4%E3%81%AE%E5%AF%86%E3%80%8D%E3%80%81%E8%AA%95%E7%94%9F%E3%81%AE%E8%83%8C%E6%99%AF%E3%81%A8%E3%81%AF%EF%BC%9F%20-%20%E6%8A%BC%E8%B0%B7%E3%83%BB%E6%9D%B1%E5%8C%97%E5%A4%A7%E6%95%99%E6%8E%88&oq=%E3%80%8C3%E3%81%A4%E3%81%AE%E5%AF%86%E3%80%8D%E3%80%81%E8%AA%95%E7%94%9F%E3%81%AE%E8%83%8C%E6%99%AF%E3%81%A8%E3%81%AF%EF%BC%9F%20-%20%E6%8A%BC%E8%B0%B7%E3%83%BB%E6%9D%B1%E5%8C%97%E5%A4%A7%E6%95%99%E6%8E%88&fbclid=IwAR0iDgCweB8WRA9o8GQIWg3E-W5ZaW5bJgHD5twPch3zQPmdgKON0j7TVEU

Fixing a truncated movie file with untrunc

Just putting this here because it worked

https://github.com/ponchio/untrunc

It was a bit of a mess. Ended up building a docker image which is such a sledge hammer to crack a but whatever. The files was from a phone that had run out of space during recording. The error when trying to examine the file with ffprobe was "moov atom not found".

Zombieing along in Japan

This is the Ministry of Health's page. They have a full breakdown of cases and outcomes.
https://www.mhlw.go.jp/stf/seisakunitsuite/bunya/newpage_00032.html
This Kyodo news page has nice graph of detected cases and testing numbers over time.
https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2020/03/c35480d9a1eb-coronavirus-outbreak-latest-march-12-2020.html
What this tells you is that what Japan has done so far has been fairly effective but it hasn't been enough. The schools have been closed for 2 weeks, events have been cancelled and still, the number of daily new cases is rising. If it was truly effective, the numbers would be going down by now. In South Korea they have been going down sharply for a week (and they are still testing like crazy).
Japan's only doing 200 tests/day in some cases. That means they're still just reactive - find a case, track the contacts, test them all. That's almost enough but not quite. You'll never find every contact, ever person who used the same shopping basket or rode the same bus. With a less transmissible virus that wouldn't matter but with this one it seems to be just enough for the virus to be winning.
I was really worried that the low testing was masking massive numbers of undiscovered infections but if that was the case, I think by now, we would see a much higher proportion of critical cases and hospitalization than we do. So we're still far away from an Italy style crisis (also our cases are spread widely, not concentrated in one small region).
The problem is that this almost-containment is not enough. Even if it stays kinda-safe, it never ends.
Japan is great at enduring pain and could probably keep this up for months but the cost would be huge. Something needs to change to turn that gradual increase into a decrease.
Two things give me hope:

1. Abe desperately wants the Olympics and they cannot happen with the status quo (forget about the crowds, the athletes are all over one-another - filthy beasts!).
2. It won't be long before South Korea's and China's daily new cases are lower than Japan's. Hopefully that's a pain Japan's government won't want to endure for long.

TL;DR I'm staying home until I have reason to believe Japan is in control of Corona virus. I urge anyone else who can work from home to do so. Please avoid crowds in your social life, especially indoors. Corona virus is not that lethal when treatment is available but it doesn't take much for hospitals to be overwhelmed, at which point things become far more dangerous.

There's a huge difference between us all getting this eventually and us all getting this at the same time.

The difference is in the death-rate. Wuhan had a death rate of 5% - "but that's Wuhan", yeah and now it's Lombardy too and it flipped in a matter of days. There was nothing especially bad about Wuhan or Hubei, they didn't have low standards of care. They were just overwhelmed.

I'm reading articles about hospitals in Lombardy that do not have enough ventilators, they are allocating them to the ones with best chances of survival. To be clear, they are picking people to live or die. That is what happens when the number of cases goes over capacity. We need to keep away from that situation. Also, the hospitals have shut down many of their other services to try deal with corona virus. People will suffer and even die due to other unrelated problems because corona is taking up resources.

The mortality rate appears to be < 1% when resources are available and 5% when they're not.

Italy had 21 cases on Feb 21, now it has a national crisis. Ireland has 34 today with a fraction of the population of either Italy or Lombardy.

Everywhere is different but nowhere is special. What happens next comes down to people's behaviour and until you know that your country really has this under control, the responsible thing to do is to play it safe. Wait until credible, independent medical experts are saying it's under control, not politicians. It's critical that we avoid the kind of spike in cases that overwhelms the system. The government has no magic wand, it might be able to build make-shift hospitals but it cannot pull doctors and ventilators out of thin-air. It can make things much worse but it's too late for them to make things much better.

You don't have to panic, you don't have to hoard. You don't need masks and litres of hand-sanitizer if you're staying in. Masks are for sick people, medical staff and people who deal with lots of customers every day and have a decent chance of getting sick and not knowing it yet. If you can, support your local businesses, because either way, this is going to suck economically.

A few links

3 small concert venues in Osaka led to at least 40 infections over a few days
https://japantoday.com/category/national/japan's-live-music-clubs-emerge-as-new-coronavirus-transmission-sites

Italy's situation
https://www.politico.eu/article/coronavirus-italy-doctors-tough-calls-survival/

Flattening the peak
https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/09-03-2020/the-three-phases-of-covid-19-and-how-we-can-make-it-manageable/

NSFW: Phun with phishing

Last night, one of my FB contacts popped up wanting to connect on FB messenger. This was odd because I was pretty sure we were already connected. Things started out innocently enough but quickly took a suspicious turn.

Time to have a little bit of fun, although it was late and I had a cold so not too much fun.

He was completely unfazed by the dildo museum. Sadly I am missing the screenshot where he told me to contact the FedEx agent but don't worry, it's https://www.messenger.com/t/R.Robertdouglas463 which FB has left intact despite me reporting it several times. Feel free to try arrange to receive your €100,000.

At this point I was off adding some extra touches to the agent's profile and my contact was getting impatient. I am not skilled at image doctoring so this took way too long for very little impact.

Just in case you can't make that out...

Finally, the man behind a million WhatsApp jokes is on my side.

Again, he take's WhatsApp-man in his strideand just resent me the profile photo of the agent and asked me to click the link again. FB nuked his account before I could get another screenshot, so this is how our conversation ended.

I reported the first account as pretending to be my friend (same name, same photo) and FB shut that down pretty quickly but it's a bit sad that they left the "agent"'s account up and running. There's no way to reach a human at FB, so these scammers can keep creating fake friends and feeding the to the same agent, I guess. Not sure if shutting down the agent would really make that much of a difference but it might at least interrupt a bunch of in-flight scamming, moreso than taking down each fake friend.

Vietnam visa service recommendation

I'm in Vietnam. The visa process is a bit messy if you have an Irish passport (some countries don't need a visa, Ireland does). It's "online" but actually you go online and find one of many travel companies and they apply for you. The Vietnam govt does not have an online service. So actually it takes some time and at the weekend it's worse. Don't be lulled into a false sense of security by "online", you need to do things 3-4 *business* days in advance.

If you're in a country with a Vietnamese embassy, doing it in person there might be best. Otherwise I can recommend

http://www.vietnamvisa.com/

They were quick to respond, even on the weekend and everything was smooth (and they were the cheapest I found for the super-express weekend service).

And then the taxi driver drove like a young Anakin Skywalker in a pod-racer. Brought me close to my hotel and tried to charge me 10x from the airport! He had a meter but he had doctored it to say 1000x instead of 100x! In the end I paid pretty close to the right price but stress on top of an already stressy day. Kept telling me he saw the money in my wallet. I kept telling him to fuck off.

Dude put his cell-phone on the dash, not for Google maps, for youtube!

I sent you a video

I always record videos of my comedy and sometimes I record other people too. If I sent you a link to a Google Photos video or album, here are a couple of hopefully helpful notes.

• Why have you done this? Maybe you asked me, maybe I just left my camera running.
• Can I download it? Yes there's an option to do that.
• Can I not download it? You can also click on the little cloud icon () and it will be copied into your Google Photos account. This means it will take up space in your account but it also means that if I delete it, you'll still have it.
• Will you delete this? If you want me to, I'll delete it any time. Generally I just keep things. I think have unlimited storage (you get it when you buy a Pixel phone) so I probably won't ever delete anything. Best to keep some sort of copy yourself though.
• Why is there an album? If I send you other videos in the future then they're all in one place. Easy to find, easy to delete.
• Why is it all grey? It takes a few minutes for Google Photos to process the video.
• Why does the quality suck? Google Photos puts up a low quality preview first and then after a while it's done processing the full quality version.
• How do I get this onto youtube? If you have the video in your own Google Photos, you can just click "upload" on Youtube's homepage and there's an import from Google Photos button. Videos uploaded to Youtube don't take space in your account (I think) but you can keep them unlisted so only people who know the URL can watch them.
• Can you don't? Yup, just tell me and I will not save any bits of your comedy that I happen to record.
• Do you watch my videos? You wish.

p^4 mod 120

In this video the Numberphile people prove in 2 ways that \(p^2 \equiv 1\ (mod\ 24)\). That is that \(p^2 - 1\) is divisible by 24, for \(p\), a prime greater than 3.

The second proof involves considering the 3 numbers \(p-1, p, p+1\). There are three consecutive numbers, so one of them must be divisible by 3 but it can't be \(p\). Also one of \(p-1, p+1\) is divisible by 4 and the other is divisible by 2. That means that \((p-1)(p+1)\) is divisible by \(2{\times}4{\times}3 = 24\). So, expanding out the product, \(p^2 \equiv 1\ (mod\ 24)\)

So then I wondered what if we look at one number either side of these three. We still have the previous factors but now we must also have a 5 and if we now say \(p > 5\) then the 5 can't be in \(p\) so we know that $$(p-2)(p-1)(p+1)(p+2) \equiv 0\ (mod\ 120)$$

Grouping things in +/- pairs we get $$(p^2-1)(p^2-4) \equiv 0\ (mod\ 120)$$

and multiplying out $$p^4 - 5p^2 + 4 \equiv 0\ (mod\ 120)$$ From the earlier result we know that \(p^2-1 \equiv 0\ (mod\ 24)\) so \(5p^2-5 \equiv 0\ (mod\ 120)\). Adding that into the previous result gives us $$p^4 - 1 \equiv 0\ (mod\ 120)$$

So now we have \(p^4 \equiv 1\ (mod\ 120)\) for prime \(p>5\).

Sadly throwing \(p-3\) and \(p+3\) in too doesn't get us a similar result, like \(p^6 \equiv 1\ (mod\ 840)\). With some fiddling around, we can get $$p^6 + 14p^2-14 \equiv 1\ (mod\ 840)$$ but nothing simpler jumps out.

This is Beijing...

This was written by someone living in China. They do no want their name on it, for obvious reasons but it is powerful. I want more people to read it, so I'm reposting it with permission.

“This is Beijing, so I can’t talk about it.”

That’s what the man in the green shirt says right before he starts talking about it.

He says he is a soldier. Just back from Xinjiang.

“It’s cultural genocide out there. We go into a village. The next day, there’s no village. But we can’t talk about it.”

And yet he keeps talking. He seems to need to say this to someone. Maybe that’s why he came for the foot rub.

I won’t recap here the issues in Xinjiang. Take advantage of the free media and educate yourself from the direct sources. Suffice to say that here on the eve of passover, the contradictions of being a Jew in a country where people are being rounded into camps becomes something between infuriating and unbearable.

I am getting a foot rub two chairs down from a soldier in the Pharaoh’s army.

At Passover we tell the story of the Jews and their exodus from Egypt and bondage. We discuss slavery and ethnic conflict. We like to say, “Never Again,” and feel righteous in our cause.

Yet I am getting a foot rub two chairs down from a soldier in the Pharaoh’s army. How do I enforce “Never Again?” What action do I take?

I feel humiliated and powerless. Every option seems petty and useless. I can’t confront this man. I can’t attack this man.

I don’t feel like there’s any right option.

I have to feel content with composing a note in my phone and trying to sort through a rage of emotion.

I wonder whether making this post will come back to harm me. My career. My life I’ve built as a stranger in a strange land.

I want to message some of my Uighur friends, see if they are ok, if their family is ok. Then I remember a friend of mine who researched in Xinjiang and told me a message from a foreigner can be enough to get people in trouble.

I sit and I do nothing, and every moment of nothing feels worse.

In the background on the TV is one of the biggest comedy shows in the country. Guo Degang is performing Xiangsheng. Nobody is watching is the comedy. The man keeps talking.

“They’re all scared. They’re not having kids. That may be how they all disappear. One missed generation.”

A missed generation. Blood on the lintels. An exodus.

Before the Jews left Egypt, we too were a people aggregated together, not of our own free will. Our exodus has happened. Others’s has not.

I am reminded of the words of William Faulkner: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

Perhaps we keep retelling the same story each year because it isn’t over.

Amusing night in the pub

I dropped into Beer Republic The Grub on Friday night. This is a bar near my station that has a few rotating taps of interesting beers. It's technically an Irish pub. If you look on their website it says so but the guy behind the bad didn't actually know this! Also, there are no Irish people there. Anyway I was there having a quiet beer and reading my book when I remembered the candle my brother had sent as a Christmas gift. It's a pear-scented candle. Knowing that this bar also likes it's whiskey, I showed to the bar man. Various other customers took a whiff too. Then he suggested we light it.

A while later he tells me the place is closing on Jan 30th and breaks out a bottle of Moet Champagne. So now I'm watching my candle through a glass of champagne.

Sitting a bit further up the counter are two Japanese women. One asks if it's an Irish drunking custom to bring a scented candle with you. It is now :)

A while later a guy comes in pretty drunk with a big box of Mr Donuts. He hands it over the counter and the staff put them on plates and it's donut time for everyone.

A while later I got talking a bit more with the 2 ladies. One of them was chatting with a guy she likes. They've been chatting on Line for about a year and she doesn't know if he's into her or not. Jesus, that's some suffering. All their friends know that she into him, nobody knows what he thinks. It's his birthday and she has bought him a small but expensive cake but the way things are going, she's going to eat it home alone tonight. His replies are too cryptic to make anything useful out of but she tries one more time. He's drinking at his home station, 5 minutes away. With a lot of encouragement from me and her friend, she leaves to meet him. I got her friend's Line contact info but there's been no report back to me at least...

I've only been in there about 5 times, this was my first Friday night. I don't know if it's usually this interesting. Makes me sad that this place is closing though.

Horrible Japanese Advertising - This Time from Dove

I've seen an unskippable 15 second ad on Youtube several times for Dove Men's Care. It really grinds my gears. In the video a man explains that his kids say "I don't want to touch dad's face" because it's too oily. WTF, where could his 4 year old kid have possibly learned this. It's pure bullshit, kids will roll around in any old filth. Then he discovers Dove For Oily Men or whatever it's called, his kids are all over him touching his face now and everyone is happy. Go fuck yourself Dove.

It tops the previous advertising directly targetting insecurities, in that case smelly over-40s men.

BTW, I'm intentionally not linking to any of Dove's crap.

Let's (not) talk about adjectives in Japanese

TL;DR Japanese doesn't really have adjectives. Everything you think of as an adjective is a verb-phrase (a tiny sentence inside the real sentence). This is great because you can put any verb-phrase in front of a noun to add simple or extremely complex descriptions to the noun. That's the only way to add descriptions to nouns in Japanese grammar. Thinking of it like gets rid of all of the exceptions and weird coincidences and reduces the number of rules you have to learn.

Japanese teachers and text books usually talk about 2 types of adjectives in Japanese but I find this confusing and more complicated than it needs to be.

First, let's start with the advanced stuff. How do you say something complicated like "a person that is riding a horse"? Now for an english speaker, this sentence doesn't have any adjectices, so why is it relevent? It's relevant because it's still a noun and something that describes the noun. It's the most general case, you can use it for the simplest and the most complex descriptions. You can say "a red person" in English but you can also switch that to "a person that is red". Anything you can do with an adjective you can do with "... that is ...". So, how do you say "a person that is riding a horse" in Japanese? It's 「馬に乗る人」. You just take the verb-phrase 「馬に乗る」 - "riding a horse" and put it in front of the noun. In English this is a bit like "a riding-a-horse person". You can do more complex things in English like "a riding-a-horse-and-eating-ice-cream person" but it gets weird and you'll probably want to switch to "a person that is riding a horse and eating ice cream". In Japanese, there's only one way it's 「馬に乗ってアイスを食べる人」. You can put the most complex verb-phrase in front of the noun and that's just how Japanese works.

So for Japanese you describe nouns by putting a verb-phrase in front but this is "advanced" grammar. Before textbooks teach you that, they will teach about い and な adjectives and you will be confused but really, both of these are just verb-phrases that go in front of a noun. I think they only get called adjectives because somebody thought "first we teach nouns, then verbs, then adjectives, then adverbs, then blah blah ... and eventually verb-phrase+noun". It's also partly because they always teach です before they teach だ to be polite. The result is the horrible confusion that is い and な adjectives.

First problem, い-adjectives can be in the past tense. WTF? How can an adjective have a tense? In fact い adjectives behave exactly like any verb in Japanese, you can make a sentence with them - 「道路が広い」 - "the road is wide". That's valid sentence. There's no other verb there. It's not like leaving out the subject in Japanese. The subject is often omitted in Japense but you can always put it back in if you like and the sentence is still correct. There is no missing verb you can put back in to 「道路が広い」, that's the whole sentence right there. You can put a です at the end to make it polite but if you were creating an impolite sentence, you couldn't put a だ in. You can even put it in the past tense - 「道路が広かった」 - "the road was wide" by conjugating the... adjective? no the verb. The verb is "to be wide" which is a bit weird for English speakers but it's not awful.

So, if it works exactly like a verb, it's a verb! If you insist that it's an adjective then you have to also explain that adjectives in Japanese have a past tense and a て form and also that Japanese has sentences with no verb sometimes.

Now let's see how it's usually introduced, as an い adjective. 「広い道路」 - "wide road". If you think of 広い as a verb then this is just a verb-phrase in front of a noun, that's not a new rule, you already knew that. 「広かった道路」 - "road that was wide" is quite natural now. It's definitely a bit weird that Japanese has a verb "to be wide" but that's a lot less weird than having adjectives with tense. "is-wide road" and "was-wide road" are the direct translations into English. You wouldn't say them but they kind of work.

So next is な adjectives. It turns out that な is actually だ in disguise. It gets pronounced な when you say it before a noun. Try saying だ instead, it's a bit awkward, so maybe that's why it morphed. So 「きれいな人」 - "a beautiful person" is really 「きれいだ人」and this becomes really obvious when you want to say "person that was beautiful" because it's 「きれいだった人」. Look at that, だった is the past tense of だ, that's not a new rule either! 「きれいだ」- "it's beautiful", 「きれいだった」 - "it was beautiful". So all we have here is just another verb-phrase in front of a noun. "an is-beautiful person", "a was-beautiful person" are the direct translations into English, again weird but they make sense.

So if I was teaching Japanese I would say that everything about adjectives and decribing nouns in Japanese can be summed up as

1. put any verb-phrase in front of a noun to add more detail, e.g. "an X that Y" in English is just 「Y X」 in Japanese.
2. there is a verb "to be wide" in Japanese and "to be blue" and lots more and they all end in い (and they behave just like every other verb in Japanese)
3. when it comes before a noun, だ turns into な

Compare that with

1. There are 2 types of adjectives in Japanese, い and な adjectives.
2. Adjectives in Japanese have tenses... seriously
   1. the past tense of an い adjective is made by blah blah (oh weird, that's a lot like verbs but let's pretend we didn't notice that)
   2. the past tense of a な adjective is made by blah blah (oh weird, that's the same as だ but we didn't learn だ yet because that's not polite!)
3. Adjectives in Japanese also have a て form, just like verbs.
4. In fact, pretty much anything else about verbs applies to adjectives, negation etc.
5. Unlike English, not all sentences in Japanese have a verb, sometimes they just end in an い adjective.
6. If you want to make a sentence out of a な adjective, you just replace な with だ unless (or drop it completely if you're using です）
7. put any verb-phrase in front of a noun to add more detail, e.g. "an X that Y" in English is just 「Y X」 in Japanese.

My way is just 3 very simple points. The standard way is so much more complicated, full of exceptions and coincidences that you're supposed to ignore.

Impressive Logo

Spotted a very impressive logo today in Sangenjaya. It's Mizumoto Ladies' Clinic and they have made an M that captures the female reproductive system in disturbing detail!

#MajorToMinor

Halloween's terrifying turnips

I would just like to remind the world that Halloween is an Irish tradition (and also Scotland/Wales - basically Celtic) There were no pumpkins in that part of the world and in fact it was traditional to carve a jack-o-lantern from a turnip, like the one in the photo here, which would eat and shit out any of these cutesy orange pumpkins I keep seeing all over the place.

That photo is from Wikipedia's Halloween page which says it's from the Museum of Country Life. Who's up for a bit turnip carving this Halloween? I don't know where to get one in Japan.