This alleyway leading to a fine Kyoto dining establishment is quintessentially Kyoto. Or, rather, is the image the Kyoto often seeks to brand itself with, even though alleyways like this are actually fairly rare. Either way, it’s nice.
They were doing some construction on the bark-covered walls as I went to the camera store, and by the time I passed by on the way back with my new lens they were done.
“Brand-spanking new, but built to look old” full exif
As I explained in the previous post, Maki and I used to go to hotspring overnights in Kyushu a lot when we lived there. These places invariably only had 10-20 rooms, although with excellent service and food. I would be hesitant to take a 2 and a 5 year old to such a place, however. So, for this excursion, our first such overnight since Genbo was born, we chose a larger hotel. The onsen, Keburikawa in Kameoka, was in fact bigger and more institutional than both of us expected. At first I was a little disappointed by this, but our room was still excellent, and the size of the place meant that we didn’t have to keep Genbo and Zoe on such a tight leash (reducing stress). I was extremely glad that we decided at the last minute to spring for the room with its own outside bath; it really made the trip for us.
Here’s the balcony off our room, with its private bath made of shigaraki pottery. In Japanese it’s called a rotenburo, which Genbo still thinks is an English word because he learned it at a friend’s house in the States where there is an outside hot-tub. It’s hilarious to hear him pronounce this very Japanese word with an American accent.
Here’s our room shot from outside on the balcony. Very nice and spacious.
“Japanese modern” was the style of the decor full exif & map
Wearing yukata, or simple kimono, is one of the pleasures of any onsen. Here is Zoe in hers, while Genbo waits in his skivies for his larger size to be delivered (he is, to put it mildly, taller than most Japanese 5-year olds). I particularly cherish this picture because Zoe, being a little bit more reserved than her brother, doesn’t often give the camera her full-wattage smile.
Onsen exist just as much for the food as the baths, and the fact that you pay by the person instead of by the room attests to where much of your money goes. Although at smaller onsen you usually eat in your room, here there was a restaurant, where everybody was knocking back beer and sake in their yukatas. You had a choice of three different meals, and we chose the wild boar, which is apparently a local specialty.
Before dinner we had gone to the large public (gender-divided) baths, but after dinner we filled our own private one. It was raining outside, which just added to the atmosphere.
This is a catch-up post. Way back in July I posted pictures of the summer festival at Genbo and Zoe’s daycare festival. In that post I described how the kids “get dressed up, dance, and pull a big o-mikoshi (御神輿—think Japanese, Shinto-based Ark-of-the-Covenant from Raiders of the Lost Ark and you aren’t too far off) around.” I always meant to post photos of that but never got around to it. We had our first real snowfall of the year here this week, so it’s nice to go back and look at some summery photos.
The other day the Kamadas came over for a little new year’s get-together, which involved hanging around at our house for a while and then going out for some great yaki-niku, where you grill your own meat at the table and drink lots of draft beer. The owner is a fan of Kamada-san’s pottery, which I’ve blogged about in the past, and he treated us like kings, especially because Kamada-san brought him a little present at my suggestion.
The photo below shows them playing something very interesting. Japanese people are very big on various forms of karuta, or cards. The most widespread version is the Hyakunin-Isshu, which was originally an anthology of 100 poems compiled in the 12th century.These were then assembled into a deck of cards, with each card containing a single poem in calligraphic form. The game is that two or more people will sit in front of the spread-out deck, while another person reads the poems at random. The contestants then have to find the appropriate card and pick it up before their opponent does. This is actually a very big “sport” in Japan, with national championships, ranks, and the level of obsession Japanese people pour into just about everything. The “pros” only have to hear one or two syllables before they recognize which poem is being read, and their hand shoots out unbelievably fast. Here is one gorgeous video showing people dressed up in the ceremonial garb of the 12th century playing the game at Yasaka Shrine in Kyoto (a ritual carried out at the beginning of each new year), and here is a national news report about the national championships, with some great video showing how fast the pros are. Coincidentally, this is at the shrine where Genbo and Zoe go to daycare.
Anyway, Genbo got a deck of karuta for new year’s from his Japanese grandparents, although these don’t have the Hyakunin-Issue poems on them, but rather kotowaza, or Japanese proverbs. Being a confucian country, Japanese people are big at sprinkling proverbs into conversation. They learn them very early—five years old, in fact. Genbo already has his proverb cards memorized, and Zoe isn’t actually half bad either.
This is an alleyway off of Kawaramachi between Sanjo and Shijo. There is a lot going on here, and the thumbnail doesn’t do it justice. I also jacked the colors up to 11 because the scene seemed to call for it, especially the reds and yellows. Japan can be so cartoony, and to me this little alley shows a little bit of that.
A few days ago Jeffrey and I went to go photograph Himukai shrine (日向神社) before the autumn leaves all fell. It was a small, unobtrusive and unpretentious shrine tucked into the foothils surrounding Kyoto, and I liked it a lot. Here are just a few pictures from the trip.
(Again I find that no matter how many lenses I take anywhere, the photos I end up using are invariably the ones taken with the Zeiss 100.)
Moss and spiderwebs (if you look carefully) against the leaves makes for a great tableau full exif
There was a little sub-shrine off to the side with a wonderfully rotting torii, or gate marking off the sacred area. I think we spent more time photographing this than everything else.
These last two photos are meant to be facing each other in a diptych. I arranged them that way in the hopes of bringing them to my photography group, which met today, but Genbo with the flu and some pesky patients at the hospital conspired to prevent that. Guess I’ll have to try again in two months.
I loathed field day when I was a kid, but undokai, the Japanese variant, is actually pretty fun. They practice lots of different kinds of dances and stunts, and the oldest kids at our particular daycare put on a great drum routine (which you’ll have to wait until next year to see).
Here is Genbo (he’s the tall white one in yellow shoes) dancing with his class.
Two days ago I met with my photographers group, which is planning for a group exhibition in a couple weeks. I brought a few candidate photos, and the leader of the group selected a macro of my friend Kamada-san’s pottery for me to present. Only, he told me to make it into a tryptic, or three-part piece. So, I’m going to reshoot it in the next few days and see what I can come up with. But doing a coherent three part piece of an abstract macro is hard. Should be interesting, though.
Here are some people arranging some pieces of another tryptic, this time of Kabuki actors. They are using a projector to show the computer screen on the wall so everyone can participate. The guy who took these photos brought in about 50 different shots to select among, and they selected a combination that I suggested, which was significantly ego-stroking to leave me smiling for a few minutes. Only, I suggested it with the two outer faces looking inward, whereas the sensei (the back of whose head is front and center here) immediately recognized that it would be better with them facing outward. And, of course he was right. His own contribution to the exhibit was tailored, I think, to be good but subdued enough not to take all the attention from everybody else’s work.
I’ve been meaning to share this video for a long time now, but only recently has my computer miraculously become able to edit video without freezing. This is some dancing from the summer festival at our daycare, described here. In this video the kids are carrying around o-mikoshi, which are little portable houses for the gods or spirits (kind of like the Ark of the Covenant in the first Indiana Jones movie). About halfway through the video switches to them dancing around the little arks.
I’m not sure to what extent this whole Shinto-inspired ritual is dependent on the fact that our daycare is part of a huge Shinto shrine. There may be some non-Shinto-affiliated daycares that do this at their own festivals, but probably not so elaborately.
Today I played in a concert along with three other people, one playing the shou (a traditional Japanese instrument also crafted from bamboo, but more like a harmonica or a mouth organ), one crystal bowls (created from melted silicon computer chips), and one singing soprano. The venue was a cafe in a machiya, or traditional Kyoto house, with a nice garden to our backs.
To be honest I didn’t have very high hopes for the ensemble, not liking “fusion” music much myself and being more of a purist when it comes to shakuhachi. However, when I met the other three and rehearsed with them for the first time a few days ago, I was amazed at how well we fit together. Basically, the crystal bowls and the shou play background harmony to the shakuhachi and/or the voice, so it all came together well without everyone interfering with each other.
Jeffrey has some photos up already. Go take a look. I should be putting up a blog post as well as soon as I can get him and some other people to send me some photos.
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.”
