(It’s Island Week all this week at GGSS, which means we’ll mostly be posting about Islands. Catchy name, huh?) The tiny volcanic island of Iwo Jima, part of the Ogasawara Islands, is just over 1000km south of Tokyo. It was…

Check out this fantastic curly bridge, which connects mainland HonshÅ« to one of the tiny islands of the Seto Inland Sea, Japan. It looks a bit like a tiny Lotus Bridge, but instead of allowing traffic to swap sides of…

Check out this cool (and very chirpy looking) globe/man thing on a roof in Tokyo. He appears to be wearing a busboy’s hat… or is it… a manhole cover? There’s some characters on the roof too, but unfortunately Japanese is…

This is Todaiji Temple in Japan, which is reputedly the largest wooden building in the world and houses another very large Buddha (under a roof though – how inconsiderate). Actually, I could well believe this is indeed the biggest wooden…

Update: Since posting this 4 hours ago, Mount Oyama has been updated to some jaw-dropping high-resolution imagery. Timing huh!? This is Mount Oyama on the Japanese island of Miyakejima, which is seen here spouting a rather impressive plume of steam.…

Seated at the top of 268 steps in the Po Lin Monastery in Hong Kong, is the Tian Tan Buddha – the world’s largest ‘seated outdoor bronze statue of the Buddha’. The 34 metre tall sculpture can be seen facing…