I found a nice, hardly-used Nikon 24/1.4 AF-S lens on the street on the way to Kyoto, so I decided to pick it up and take it on my daily constitutional.

This is a throwaway shot from my station that I ended up liking somehow. There’s something about the balance between the three people coming up the stairs, the converging lines of the tracks, and the big wall that I like.

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This is the Higashi Honganji temple, right outside of Kyoto station. It’s been under construction/refurbishment for years, and it still has years to go, I think. Whenever I walk by it, which is frequently on these walks, I think about how intentionally oppressive it is. There’s nothing particularly pretty or aesthetically pleasing about it; it’s just a raw statement of political power, which various Buddhist sects wielded lots of back in the day.

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This car is red
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This next photo is taken from a comfy-seat inside a Starbucks. I’ve walked past this particular Starbucks for years without realizing that it abuts this ancient temple (Rokkakudo), which it reveals with a huge wall of glass. The other day I went into it just by accident, looking for the closest hit of espresso I could find, and was incredibly pleasantly surprised. It looks so unassuming from the outside that it is always almost empty, making it about as perfect a cafe that a huge soulless chain can be.

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This is the rear side of some store…I didn’t even bother looking at the front. I love these traditional external walls, fire-treated to make them weather-resistant.

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More walls. This time I liked the convergence of the three different textures.

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And, finally…guy with clicker waiting for his garage door to close. There was something about his face I liked; everybody gets an expression, while waiting just a few seconds for something, when they completely enter their own little world for just a moment, that I think is almost endearing.

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I’ve been wanting to take some close-ups of eyes for the next meeting of my photography group, and foolishly thought that maybe I could get my kids to cooperate. This first photo here happened basically by chance, but none of the others were what I was aiming for. So much for getting my kids to hold still. Still I took the opportunity to grab some nice photos of everybody. Here I used a plugin called Silver Effects Pro for the B&W conversion.

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Today was Christmas Eve, and we enjoyed it eating a nice dinner together cooked by other people.

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Zoe got a new ballet leotard today, which she wanted to show off as soon as we got home.

Very composed
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Followed by a graceful bow that somehow went wrong…

or Not So Composed
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“Christmas cakes” are a big tradition in Japan. Do people do this in the States as well?

I have no idea what Genbo is doing or thinking
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I don’t know why, but I like this shot of Zoe and me, taken by Genbo. Maybe because it does a good job of revealing Zoe at what I think is a sort of tipping point in her development. Up to now she has been the quintessential “little girl,” but now she is getting into ballet, learning how to read, learning how to write…All things that are taking her into the next stage of her life, which is poignant for me to watch and take part in.

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Here are some shots from our balcony of a rainbow that greeted us on today’s beautiful fall morning…

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Japanese people call any running over about 30 seconds “marathon,” which is incredibly annoying to someone like me who prefers to assume that words mean actual things. I wouldn’t mind it if “marason” was simply a loanword from English to Japanese that came to mean “running” or something like that. But, Japanese people know that it’s supposed to mean a 42 km race; they just generally feel free to mangle meanings of words that come from English. It’s as though Americans knew the word “sushi” was supposed to mean vinnegared rice with raw fish, but felt perfectly justified using it to refer to hamburgers as well, because hey, that’s meat and starch too, and it’s just a foreign word, so who gives a shit.

Anway, Genbo and his class ran a “marason” the other day. They had been practicing for it for a long time, and he was pretty excited about it, so I went down and snapped some photos. This particular marathon was 1 km, and Genbo came in 14th place out of 59 boys in his class.

Home stretch
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Almost there!
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Here are some photos of him I snapped the other day…

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One of the things that is both so endearing and frustrating about Japan is that it is truly a culture without irony. It is a culture that can have an official Coming of Age ceremony at Disneyland and see no irony in it at all. You know all those whacky commercials Japan is famous for? These are only possible in a country without irony, and indeed those commercials are not actually ironic, which makes them all the more amazing.

This is a small shrine I came across on a recent walk through Kyoto. The large red sign says “God of Academics”, while the two vertical black and white signs on either side say, essentially, throw money in and pray here for academic success and getting into a good school. This is all perfectly normal, but I loved the fact that the same shrine would also put up the vertical wooden sign to the far right, which says “Fortune-Telling School.”

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OK, I think I pulled a record (for me) of not posting for about 3 months. I have been both busy with work and playing more shakuhachi than usual, which, because these things are largely zero-sum, means less photography. I’ve been wanting to get back into it, however, and recently I’ve been taking long walks through Kyoto, which has been giving me plenty of material. Here is one shot I particularly like from my last outing.

(Update: Funny, but I just noticed that both this post and my last one from three months ago are of birds catching fish. Not that this is a long-running theme of mine…)

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This past weekend we went with Maki’s extended family to the Nagara river in Gifu, about 2 hours drive from here, to see u-kai, or cormorant fishing at night. This is an ancient method of fishing in which you have a bunch of cormorants on leashes, and you lead them out at night with giant bonfires on boats to let them see the ayu (“tasty river fish”) you want them to catch. They dive down and catch the fish, but cannot swallow them because of the ropes around their necks. Then you rob the poor bird of its catch and then eat it yourself. Or, give it to your feudal master, as the case may be. I’ll have a more comprehensive post on the whole experience later, but I liked these first three shots enough to post them alone.

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Here are shots of everybody at Muir Woods.

Dunno why giant trees inspire giggles…
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Into the woods…
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Waiting for their turn in the tree…
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Hanging out in the burned out bole of a tree
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This giant tree had fallen over the path. You can see where it fell from in the middle of the frame. Genbo is standing on about the midway point of the tree, and it continues way past the edge of the frame to the right.

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