From a final resting place for the dead to a gnarly way to land a trick; a Thai coffin-maker is affixing Buddhist emblems to the dismantled walls of his caskets, and transforming them into skateboards.
As the popularity of board sports exploded in Thailand, and the price of a skateboard skyrocketed, Anusorn Yungyearn decided to breathe new life into some of the wooden caskets he had lying around his Bangkok workshop.
“I want to give the kids who don’t really have much chance in life an opportunity to skate,” said the 30-year-old.
Photo: AFP
“I also don’t want them to ask their parents to buy one for them since the cost of it is really high.”
In the past year hordes of young Thais have taken up skateboarding and surf-skating — likely a consequence of most social spaces like bars and gyms being closed for months at a time because of pandemic restrictions.
Today, bands of young skaters can be seen cruising through Bangkok’s historic quarter and its universities’ open spaces.
Photo: AFP
Anusorn’s warehouse has coffins with brocade designs, golden lattice work and even holographic stick-ons. But for his boards, he has decided to keep it comparatively simple — gleaming white with golden trimming on the bottom.
“The procedure of making these boards is almost exactly like making the coffins,” he said, adding that he sticks a signature twist to the boards.
“We put the Thai angel emblem and the Thai traditional border on the board’s edge.” The first 10 he flips from coffins to skateboards will be donated to lower-income families — though he admitted getting them right will be tough.
Photo: AFP
“Some kids have never ever heard of a skateboard before so we want to make these casket skateboards as close to the real boards as possible.
“That way they could play and smile a little bit from all the fun.”
Aug. 25 to Aug. 31 Although Mr. Lin (林) had been married to his Japanese wife for a decade, their union was never legally recognized — and even their daughter was officially deemed illegitimate. During the first half of Japanese rule in Taiwan, only marriages between Japanese men and Taiwanese women were valid, unless the Taiwanese husband formally joined a Japanese household. In 1920, Lin took his frustrations directly to the Ministry of Home Affairs: “Since Japan took possession of Taiwan, we have obeyed the government’s directives and committed ourselves to breaking old Qing-era customs. Yet ... our marriages remain unrecognized,
During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.” Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as
By 1971, heroin and opium use among US troops fighting in Vietnam had reached epidemic proportions, with 42 percent of American servicemen saying they’d tried opioids at least once and around 20 percent claiming some level of addiction, according to the US Department of Defense. Though heroin use by US troops has been little discussed in the context of Taiwan, these and other drugs — produced in part by rogue Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies then in Thailand and Myanmar — also spread to US military bases on the island, where soldiers were often stoned or high. American military policeman
An attempt to promote friendship between Japan and countries in Africa has transformed into a xenophobic row about migration after inaccurate media reports suggested the scheme would lead to a “flood of immigrants.” The controversy erupted after the Japan International Cooperation Agency, or JICA, said this month it had designated four Japanese cities as “Africa hometowns” for partner countries in Africa: Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. The program, announced at the end of an international conference on African development in Yokohama, will involve personnel exchanges and events to foster closer ties between the four regional Japanese cities — Imabari, Kisarazu, Sanjo and
RSS