jacki long: Day 5025: Playing by Ear? & Japan is Solarizing.

Thursday, May 28, 2026

Day 5025: Playing by Ear? & Japan is Solarizing.

:Drama": junk collage, digital collage.

Want music?

Click: Jada Monroe, The Woman I Used to Be.

"Bamboo Shoots Sprout"

According to Japan's ancient calendar of 72 microseasons, mid-May is when bamboo shoots sprout. Known as takenoko in Japan, these voracious plants have numerous uses in Japan, both as building materials but also edible vegetables. They can be store-bought but in ancient Japan they were delicacies that had to be picked and eaten right away or they would harden. The image above from the 1800s is part of a series depicting seasonal activities around the year. This one, from May, is a beautiful triptych that depicts noblewomen out on an excursion to gather bamboo shoots.

2GN2S ... Hmmm

Today I was responding on a text to WonderWoman, we were talking and I said, "I'll play it by ear."

And then, I wondered if anyone said that anymore? The reference (for me) comes from my learning to play my pieces on the piano, finding the notes by ear. My Dad used to use that term sometimes, and today it popped out of me?

Google said it better: To play it by ear is to act spontaneously and according to the situation. Playing it by ear means you have no game plan. The original meaning of this term was to play music without sheet music, meaning you either remembered the music or improvised it. Have you ever heard it, or said it? Just curious.

Jordan, Zack, Jacob

Three young "Grandhunks", 2002

Japan is covering its highway sound barriers with solar panels — turning infrastructure nobody notices into clean energy nobody expected.

Japan's highway network stretches thousands of kilometers across a mountainous archipelago where flat land is scarce and expensive. Sound barriers — the tall concrete and metal walls built alongside highways to protect neighboring communities from traffic noise — line virtually every urban and suburban highway section. They face the sun. They are structurally robust. And until recently, they generated nothing.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism has launched a program to retrofit sound barriers along the Tomei, Chuo, and Meishin expressways with thin-film photovoltaic panels integrated into the barrier surface. The panels generate electricity that powers highway lighting, traffic management systems, and electric vehicle charging at adjacent service areas — all without requiring a single square meter of additional land.

Japan's land constraint has driven some of the world's most creative solar deployment thinking. Alongside sound barriers, the country is integrating solar panels into noise walls at railway stations, into the roofs and walls of highway tunnels where light is available, and into the surfaces of agricultural greenhouses where translucent panels allow partial light transmission to crops below.
The innovation that makes this particularly compelling is flexible thin-film solar — panels that can be bonded to curved and non-standard surfaces that rigid silicon panels cannot accommodate. Japanese manufacturers including Sharp and Kaneka are leaders in thin-film photovoltaic technology, producing panels specifically designed for building-integrated and infrastructure-integrated applications.
Japan's solar strategy is simple: if it faces the sun, it should generate electricity.