I’ve got not one but two concerts tomorrow, so for good luck I think I’ll post some more shakuhachi macros to follow up on my previous post.
As I mentioned before, the friend of my teacher’s who did this maki-e is the official artisan for the imperial household, the official symbol of which is the chrysanthemum. Apparently he can use the chrysanthemum motif for other things as well, as long as it doesn’t have the same number of petals as the imperial one, which is sometimes 14 and sometimes 16.
I knew this shakuhachi from before it got the gold leaf; I had tried to play it and completely failed. (This is a very “high octane” flute–it will perform for you, but you gotta have the breath or it won’t even give you as much sound as a beginner instrument). When I first saw it with the maki-e, I thought it didn’t need it, but now that I’m used to it I just love it.
Bamboo starts out pale yellow and gets darker with age. This dark color is, in official shakuhachi parlance, called “really frickin’ old.”
Taking a break from the macros: just some random shots from the playground today.
I don’t know the origin of this particular Japanese quirk, but they are big into what they call tetsubo, which is what Genbo, Zoe, and their friends are playing on here. They teach ‘em really young how to whirl around on the things forward and backward from the waist, and if you can’t do it it’s a horrible mark of shame. One girl I know who is in second grade (I think) has her name perpetually on the blackboard because she can’t do the backflip. Zoe, obviously, can’t do any of that stuff, but she can hang from the bars for an amazingly long time.
Genbo is being pulled into the vortex!
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Zoe loves going down the slide, and went down today at least 10 times. On the tenth time, however, she decided it was “scary” and she was having no more of it.
“You’re not going to make me go down that death trap, are you daddy?”
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She’s been mastering the swing lately too. She used to be scared of swinging much at all, but now she can go pretty high.
And, finally, Genbo looking dashing as ever as he’s about to go down the slide.
One of the shakuhachis I am most fortunate to own is called Jo-un (恕雲), made by Tomomasa Gakudo (岳童友正) early in the 20th century. The bamboo itself, however, is clearly much older. The thing plays like a monster. No other shakuhachi I have ever played has the same tone. One friend and a fan of my teacher Taniguchi-sensei was the official maki-e (gold leaf art) artisan of the imperial family, and he decorated a few flutes for my teacher. Jo-un is one.
I took these macros with paired 27.5 mm extension tubes and a 1.4 teleconverter attached to my ZF 100/2. To give you an idea of the size, the width of each of these is less than my thumbnail. To have brushed on many successive layers of gold leaf in such a scale and with such precision boggles the mind.
I should really write an explanation of what the characters written in gold leaf mean, their history, etc., but I’m tired, I’ve had my nightly nip of scotch already, and tomorrow’s a long day.
Chrysanthemum motif around a finger-hole
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Here are a few more that didn’t make it into yesterday’s post because they showed no “naked” earth.
I’ve talked about my potter friend Koji Kamada (鎌田幸二) twice before. This time I asked him for some fragments of broken pieces to play around with and he was nice enough to oblige.
These shots were taken with my ZF 100/2 macro lens, my very crappy tripod (I used a 5 second timer, on the theory that all the wobbles from pressing the button would have extinguished by 5 seconds after pushing the shutter), my SB-900 flash, and a PK-13 extension tube. This 27.5 mm ring is just an empty tube that fits between the lens and the camera. Working on the same principle that when you move a magnifying glass farther away what’s in it gets bigger, this little ring can magnify images by a lot. And, since it’s just empty space in there, there is no loss of image quality. What you do lose is light, and the ability to focus very far away, but both of these are negligible for table-top macro photography.
Since I used a macro lens with an extension ring, what you are seeing are very, very close-up images of these fragments. Unfortunately my Nikon D90 does not glean any photographic information from the lens, but these were all taken between f11 and f16. Even at these small apertures, the depth of field is still incredibly small at this short distance.
Finally, in this series the one that really benefits from clicking to enlarge is the second one, since its horizontal orientation means that it gets shrunk by a lot to fit into the space. And, this is the one that best exposes the boundary between stone and glass (which is really what the glaze is).
Today is Genbo’s birthday. Five years ago today he obligingly came into the world five minutes before his due date of Friday the 13th. We did the cake thing yesterday, since Maki was home early that day, and he got one present then and one present today.
Last year I took photos with a flash (an external flash, bounced off the ceiling, of course), but this year I tried using my light-sucking 35/1.8 with just natural light. They both have their good qualities, although I think that maybe judicious use of flash in the end produces better photos, despite the fact that non-flash gives better ambience. (With flash the average quality of all indoor photos is probably higher, although without it you probably get better outliers.)
Eyes light up even more than the candles
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Mmmm…Blueberry Totoro cake looks goooood
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Woops! Forgot to tell him to make a wish. Probably extraneous at this age anyway 
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What’s going on in that little brain of his, I wonder
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Oh, how I wish this photo were in better focus…
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Genbo loves all things oceanic, so I bought a cool scientific ocean pop-up book. He found it interesting, but not nearly as engrossing as the present he asked for: a light-and-sound producing sword from some Power-Rangers knockoff currently popular. We definitely don’t show him that stuff, but he’s exposed to it at daycare.
Not exactly what I would have selected myself for him, but nor was it bad enough to refuse.
“With great power comes great responsibility”
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It appears that my Jewish genes effectively cancel out the sword-wielding half of his genetic makeup:
Genbo, you gotta learn how to hold a sword
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That’s better. Doing battle with the hanger monster
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In then end, even great warriors submit to kisses from mommy
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(I’m aware that in the States people have (often elaborate) birthday parties for children this age, but they definitely do not in Japan. This is one relatively rare instance where the Japanese way just makes more sense to me.)
One of Genbo’s most loved activities is throwing rocks into bodies of water. I don’t know if all children love this as much as he does, but ever since he could throw this has been a favorite.
This is the canal that goes from lake Biwa from where we are all the way down (I think) to Osaka Bay. Here we are near our old house in Fushimi, Kyoto, when we went down there to see our friends the Kamadas.
Buddhist monk reading Heidegger’s Phenomenology of the Spirit on the train
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(I only wish you could read the title in the photo, although it’s in Japanese, so (most of) you would have had to take my word for it anyway.)
Seems like a long time since I just grabbed my camera and went around Kyoto shooting. Did so the other day, and here are some of my favorite shots.
This girl spent about 20 minutes staring at her cell phone on San-jo Bridge while I snapped picture after picture of her from the outside tables at Starbucks. Never could tell if she noticed me.
Taken from the same chair
This guy was obviously not averse to having his picture taken
This woman was praying at a local shrine on Teramachi.
I’ve been noticing all the corrugated tin buildings in Japan lately. This one, in the middle of Kyoto, makes a great pair with the temple behind it. Now only if a white egret or even a tombi (black kite, kind of like a hawk) had graced the temple roof to offset the crow on the tin shed, the picture would have been perfect.
It’s been a very rainy summer here in Japan, but we still manage to go out to the neighborhood pool nearly every weekend. Genbo, especially, loves it. Playing in water in all its forms has to the pinnacle of fun for Genbo, even down to his favorite animals: dolphins and killer whales. When I bought an ocean nature DVD a couple years ago I was scared that perhaps the scene in which an orca kills some seals would traumatize him. Not only did it not phaze him then, but it’s now his favorite scene to watch. That, and the one where they kill a baby grey whale. Not sure what to think about that.
A young boy cavorting in the water for as long as he possibly can…
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Zoe is more ambivalent. Sometimes she’ll play, but more often than not she’s content just to sit and watch. Here is a series of the former.
