This will be my last post of this year, with less than 2 hours left to go here in Japan. For some reason a few shots of these berries seems fitting.
As a great poet of Japan once observed (paraphrased), “Winter is very grey and blah, but at least we got these Nandina domestica berries everywhere.”
Here’s hoping that 2008 will be at least as good as 2007.
…is apparent if you speak Japanese. The name of this building is, inexplicably, The Science of Happiness
When I was a kid we used to have great Christmases, despite being basically agnostic Jews. Then again, for a few years there I think we had both Christmas and Hannukah. We used to go out in search of a real tree on a lot, cut it down, bring it home, decorate it, and put presents underneath. I remember waking up late one night, padding out to the tree, and thinking that perhaps Santa wasn’t real, but perhaps he was. This is one of my earliest memories, and it’s perhaps fitting to my personality that it’s one of uncertainty.
Since then Christmas has become something dreaded, since I tend to detest the ubiquitous Christmas songs, tacky urban decorations, and most everything else that comes with the season. All this is just as prevalent in Japan as the US. More, maybe, since the Japanese tend to have no compunction about wholeheartedly appropriating other countries’ holidays, and they have no silly hang-ups about “authenticity” (a concept I think is basically absent from East Asia, for good or for worse).
Maki and I have never celebrated Christmas together, not even exchanging presents. We’re just not big gift-givers. She can never think of anything she wants, and I tend to buy what I want anyway. :)
Anyway, this is the first year that, at three, Genbo was really ready for Christmas. He was primed with Santa-lore and Christmas carols that his Shinto pre-school taught him in a melange of Japanese and English. Yes, you can sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in Japanese.
So, we got him some presents. Trains, of course, since that’s what he loves above all else in this world. It’s a good thing we had gotten him some things, since it turns out that lots of friends of ours did too. In fact, our presents were kind of shown up by other people’s!
Here is Genbo unwrapping his biggest present, an electric-powered really-moving lights-flashing motorcycle.
Deciding how to approach the unwrapping
Starting to figure out what it is and getting suitably excited…
Riding around the living room in his Thomas helmet
Zoe test rides her new rocking horse
Genbo and Zoe ready to ride out together
Finally, the day ended with us posing for our new year’s cards, which we tend to send a trifle late. Imagine Genbo and me standing next to Zoe and Maki.
I couldn’t decide which of these three I liked best. The one in the middle is straight out of the camera.
I took this with my 300 lens with a 1.4x teleconverter, for an effective telephoto length of 420 mm. That’s why there’s so much noise in the picture – I had to jack the sensitivity (ISO) to 1600 to get a decent exposure. Even with that that high of an ISO, the shutter speed is only 1/142. Pretty good, considering the old rule of thumb would require a shutter speed of 1/400 or so without VR (vibration reduction), which my 300 mm lens does not have. I’m a spendthrift when it comes to lenses, you see.
[Update: Actually, strike that. The reason I don't have a 300 mm lens with VR is that nobody makes one. Nikon does make a f2.8 lens with VR, which lets in twice as much light as an f4 lens, but it's massively heavy and massively expensive, and not really suited to street photography. If Nikon does update their 300 mm f4 to include VR I will be hard pressed not to indulge myself. Then again, VR only helps with hand-shake, not with people in the frame moving, and since I use my 300 to photograph mostly moving people, VR might not help that much....Ahh, one can (and often does) weigh the various variables all day!]
These girls saw me shooting, and the one in back kept on trying to hide behind her friend while peeking out at me. It was hilarious. I like random people on the street who have a sense of humor, something unfortunately relatively rare in these parts.
Yeah, my baby wears leg-warmers. With bright orange and blue stripes.
You got a problem with that?
They love those new blue LEDs here. (Corner of Kawaramachi and Shijo)
Building something new close to an old temple in the middle of the city. (Kawaramachi below Oike)
See the little alleyway in the center? That leads to an upscale restaurant. Very Kyoto-esque. (Kiyamachi above Sanjo)
Finally, this one shows an old temple surrounded by many new buildings. The front of the temple faces the right of the frame, while in back is the temple graveyard. They are building something new here, too, and you can bet that the wall of the new building is going to be about one centimeter away from the closest gravestone. (Takoyakushi and Kawaramachi)
This picture is of Zoe chewing on my nose. I don’t know about other parents, but when you have a big Jewish nose the tip of the proboscis in question is just irresistible to young babies, who love to latch onto it with their gums and suck.
OK, I admit it sounds gross when put into writing, but it’s actually incredibly tender and sweet to be on the receiving end, and has been one of my most unexpected joys of being a dad.
However, as the end came with Genbo so it comes with Zoe. The end, you see, is teeth. Zoe still wants to play our little game, but those are strong jaws she’s got, and with her teeth coming in now I have to gently prevent her from locking on or risk serious bodily injury.
When I look at this picture I feel a little pang of loss.
This morning I went, as I often do, to Starbucks to get some work done. I do this for two reasons: Maki and the baby are still at home, and I need to get my requisite hours of alone-ness for the day; also, unlike the US there is no wireless Internet at Starbucks here, a productivity boon the discipline-challenged like me.
This woman sitting next to me all of the sudden offers me the little bag of rice pictured above. It’s from a care package by the Bank of Kyoto, probably for opening up an account. She says she won’t eat it (which itself is odd for a Japanese person), so I take it because we will and thank her. However, over the course of the next hour while I try to get work done it becomes all too obvious that this woman is seriously mentally disturbed, probably schizophrenic. The conversation consists entirely of non-sequitors, conspiracy theory, and unsettling non-blinking looks.
I try to be as polite as possible without explicitly encouraging more conversation. Eventually she leaves.
I wonder what to do with the rice. It occurs to me that there is a vanishingly small but non-zero chance that it’s been tampered with. I don’t really believe this, but then again I’m not sure I can feel good about feeding my family, including a very young baby, with this rice. Probably irrational of me, but there you have it.
Later I’m writing up a to-do list for the day. Not 10 seconds after I type the words “Throw away rice” she re-appears at the table and gives me the money pictured above. I object, but she insists, saying “You’ll eat the rice for me, right?” and I just accept the cash rather than make a protracted exchange out of it. She leaves again.
Now that she’s theoretically paid me 20 Euros and 1 dollar to eat this rice, I feel even worse about throwing it away. Now I’ve not only wasted some rice, I’ve also welched on a paid transaction. However, she’s exhibited even more evidence of freakiness, and I am no longer even conflicted about feeding this stuff to my family. It ain’t gonna happen.
But, what do I do with it? Seems like it would violate some universal law of something to just up and throw it away now. Give it to someone else along with the money, and let them deal with the conundrum of having this big American guy offer to pay them in foreign currency to eat some rice? Nah…If I’m not willing to eat it myself, then I cannot conscionably give it to someone else.
Can’t use it, can’t throw it away, and can’t give it to someone else. I feel like Frodo.
This little shack sells sweet potatoes. And, they must be darn good ones because there is usually a huge line. These nice folk are waiting for the place to open.
(Japanese people in general seem more willing than Americans to wait excruciatingly long times for food. It’s part of a general obsession with food here that is well-commented upon. There’s no need for a Food Channel in Japan, for example, because every channel is the food channel. Every conceivable kind of program manages to find some way to film someone eating something enthusiastically and trying to describe just how good it tastes to the camera. My personal baseless theory is that this is because during and after the war there was so little to eat that once the country got back on its feet those who were deprived for so long went berserk enjoying the new abundance. This overcompensation then just became stuck as a part of the culture, and applies even to people of later generations who never knew food deprivation.)
