Oideyasu! Please take off your shoes.
Kyoto is divided into districts called "ku", usually translated as "ward". So, in addition to having a city hall, there are ward offices, which is where we go to handle national health insurance matters and get my gaijin license renewed. My ku is "Sakyo-ku", with the "Sa" part of the name meaning "left", as in your left hand, and "left ward" in combination. The funny thing is, look at a map and I'm all the way on the extreme right (east) side of the city, right up against the mountains. There is an Ukyo-ku meaning "right ward", and you can guess where that is, over there on the left. (Hi, Trent, you reading this over on the west side?) So, what does it mean? In fact, the names were assigned based on the view from the Imperial Palace, which *was* in the extreme north (the city has grown a bit in the last 1200 years), and faced south, so left was right and right was left, and it still is. It's all relative to your point of view, as with sooo many things. and yes, Kyoto follows the worldwide tradition of having it's seedier neighborhoods in the south.
We went to a lecture yesterday by SuperTranslator/Interpreter to the stars Natsuko Toda at the Kyoto Kokusai Hotel. She translates and makes the subtitles for most major Hollywood movies coming to Japan.
Yesterday, she said she was working on a movie called "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" with the deadline fast approaching, and she admitted that she was stuck on one line, so she put it up on the whiteboard:
"It's all Greek to me."
Two characters enter a Greek (Greek-American) wedding and one asks the other what's going on, and the reply is, "It's all Greek to me."
Of course, everyone thinks they know, and 400 voices mutter "chinpun-kanpun," but we also know that Toda Natsuko is not an idiot. The problem, she says, is that it has to refer to Greece and it has to be funny. Oh, and also it has to be read within 1.5 seconds, which means 4 or 5 characters.
One guy suggested "Saatene," (atene = athens) but that didn't seem to do it for her.
Ready, Go!
A house on the edge of Takaragaike Park. Across the street from this house is the Kodomo no rakuen (Children's Paradise Park) part of Takaragaike Park, which is quite large for Japan. The interesting thing about the kids park is that there are signs at the entrance that say, "No adults allowed unless accompanied by children." The white building detached from the house is called a kura, a storeroom or vault. Fires used to ravage entire blocks, so the thick-walled non-flammable kura served as a kind of saef deposit box. Some still are used, and others that still exist have been turned into shops.
The simple stuff is the good stuff. I suppose before I came to Japan I would have looked at something like this with some suspicion, but now it just sets my mouth to watering. Cooking by Yoshiko.
Where I can light incense and talk to Mom.
This prewar building was designed by American turned Japanese citizen William Merrell Vories, who also designed much of Doshisha University in Kyoto and the Toyosato, Shiga school that has been much in the news lately.
Safari v67...tabbed browsing...Get it now!...can't talk. (scroll down below search box)
Click for 800 X 600 desktop background/wallpaper of a Matsubara ocha-ya.
Living in an anonymous little suburb in the northeastern corner of Kyoto, between a little hill and a little "one man car" railroad.
Looking north over Kamo River from Sanjo-dori (3rd Street) bridge, Kyoto
If you are going to be traveling in Japan for a short time, it makes sense to buy a Japan Rail Pass, which allows you virtually unlimited travel on JR trains, including Shinkansen bullet trains.
No: if you will be staying in one area only, or in an area with train lines other than JR lines, this may not be economically advantageous. For most travelers, it is.
Warning: You must buy the Japan Rail Pass BEFORE you come to japan.
Distributors where you can buy Japan Rail Pass
This is basically what you see around my mother-in-law's house, especially in the evening. Maiko coming and going from their assignations, popping in and out of teahouses, dormitories and taxis. It's a little hard to fathom, but this is not some retro-kitsch. This is the way it has always been here. I took this picture yesterday. Mama's house in previous generations was a sake shop supplying the surrounding ocha-ya (teahouses). Actually, there is some retro-kitsch, because there are shops where you can dress up like a geisha and take a guided tour, so some tourists might take pictures of them by mistake, though you can sometimes see a guide carrying a sign that says these are not real maiko. Some kind of deal struck under pressure from the neighborhood merchants association, I suspect.
click for 800 X 600 desktop background image of the wall of a Matsubara ochaya (teahouse)
Or choose 1024 X 768
click for 800 X 600 desktop background of a Kyoto ocha-ya (teahouse), the maiko/geisha entertainment restaurants.
Or choose 1024 X 768
meanwhile, on another planet, spring comes to Kyoto.
Doesn't he look like the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz in this picture? He lives just down the street. People say golden retrievers are not good watchdogs because they are so mild mannered (otonashii), but Juri is really perceptive. He is sitting in front of his house like this most mornings, monitoring traffic. He seems to know who lives around here, and lets them pass with a nod. Strangers get closely watched, but not harassed. Last year I saw about 100 grade school kids come by one day, shouting and running around him, trying to get his attention, and he just sat there regally, watching everyone, checking for traffic, but he didn't even open his mouth. He is very businesslike when he is at his sentry post like this, but one he goes on his walk, he's bouncing around and wants to play with everyone. Great dog.
Salam (Where is Raed?) has posted again, this time with some helpful targeting advice for the CIA, who probably ARE reading his blog.
BBC is saying the streets of Baghdad are closed as the deadline arrives (just two minutes ago), but Salam says different.
That's how I feel about the way things are going. Sound trucks were driving around town today, ringing like Judgment, criticizing the U.S. plan for war and the Japanese govt backing, and I came home from work to read about the 48-hour deadline.
Who are these missiles and bombs going to fall on? I've been reading the posts ofIraqi blogger Salam since December. The Axis of Evil?
He pees through his gate when a person he likes visits him. He lives right next to the Kyoto International Conference Hall where the World Water Forum is going on. Actually, I found out his name is Jiro, but I had been calling him Barney for a long time.
Can you tell what it represents? Click link below.
The big dipper. Tofukuji is especially beautiful in autumn.
From last week's illuminated art display in Maruyama Park.
Sakura on trellis at Heian Shrine (left) and along Takano River in front of Hiei-zan (right).
The first time I noticed this inside detail at Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto, I was struck by how much it reminded me of Mexican workmanship. Kiyomizu is a great place to see sakura next month, by the way. They even have illumination at night for a dramatic atmosphere.
On Saturday Yoshiko came home with two fancy bentos like this from Mama. Note the cherry blossom garnish (continued inside)
My mother-in-law has some amazing stuff wrapped up and tucked away in her old house, which predates Meiji. She said this was used upstairs in the "servant's" room, and a collector said it was an intercom rather than a , but he wasn't sure. It's an Ericsson, anyway, and the finish on the wood is still glossy.
Near Shinsaibashi station. It has an automatic watering system.
Did I mention that my wife is the best?
A Google search for the string "George Bush is very intelligent" got me no returns (as of March 2003). Zero. No one of any import has written those words in a place accessible to Google. Makes me proud to be an American.
Google search: "George Bush is very intelligent" : 0 results
Google search: "George Bush is an idiot" : 176 results
Looking south over a rice paddy toward downtown Kyoto from the extreme north of Kyoto city proper, a district called Iwakura. We live between those two hills. Rice growing in the field is "ine" (rhymes with ebay) in Japanese. Harvested rice that you buy in the supermarket is "kome" (no way), and when it's steaming in a bowl, it's called "gohan." And that's not even all the words for rice. A few years ago my friend Trent got a good deal on a 30kg restaurant-size bag of Koshi-hikari, one of Japan's premium brands, and we split it. Carrying 15kg of rice back from the station was a workout. It was good, but my favorite brand is Akita Komachi. Very aromatic.
Yoshiko with our Burley Samba at Sanjo bridge in Kyoto. This used to be an all-wooden bridge.
Yoshiko and I went last night. Here is my first photo, I'll post more here. Event continues through Sunday (see earlier post below), but Yoshiko said it would rain today (it is, the fourth saturday in a row with constant rain.), and tomorrow she's working at the opening of the World Water Forum. The crown prince should be there, and she's hoping to see Masako. If you go, don't forget to go to Maruyama Park, because there is an amazing light art exhibition going on.
The park around Osaka Castle is one of the most popular places in Kansai for cherry blossom picnics.
This is from my "Keep the Water on the Left" tour of 1995, when I was new in Japan. From Osaka I went through Kyoto along the Yodogawa River, then over the hills to lake Biwa, up around the east shore of Lake Biwa, over to Tsuruga on the Japan Sea, and up the Echizen coast to Tojinbo. Keep the water on the left.
A snow cone, binoculars, a jaunty "hey there" posture, a backdrop of 70's guys. On the tarmac at an airshow, perhaps in El Toro. I don't know the year, I forget how old I am.
Black-crowned night heron. He's cool, he just waits for food to come to him, then he pounces.
I know what you want. Sakura pictures, right? That's the number one search term on this web site. OK, here's your sakura. this is Okazaki canal, near Heian Jingu, looking toward Ginkakuji/Daimonji. If a few weeks it will look like this.
Last year we went to an evening piano concert under the sakura at Heian Jingu. The pianist was on a pavilion on the pond, and the audience was spread out on the path around the pond. It started to rain, but it was nice as the sky darkened and the illumination of the blossoms became more dramatic.
Weirdest search term to show up in my referrer logs: "Hirohito is alive".
Huh?
I shot almost a whole roll, only to be told by my brother-in-law when we got home that the island with the tunnel is man-made. Ha~ha!
Hey, Eric Yoshimitsu, here's a picture I took of you, Eric Yoshimitsu, fencing saber back in 1988 or so. Wherever you are, I hope you search your name on Google some day and find this picture of you when you were a pretty good fencer.
Does my old teammate Gerald Kim check his name in Google? If Gerald Kim does that, Gerald Kim might find this picture of himself fencing foil for Cal State Fullerton at Stanford back in 1989.
A lot of people are unaware that after his humiliation in Chicago, Bad, Bad Leroy Brown moved to Osaka to start over.
Shisen-do looks great in any season.
On the day I took these pictures, after we had wandered most of the garden, a cold wind suddenly blew up and the sky clouded over.
Thunder soon followed, and we scurried in under the eaves and waited on the pavilion below (click for bigger picture) with a dozen or so people, all without umbrellas.
No problem, it's a good chance to stop and do nothing but sit and breathe and drink tea and breathe some more. listten to sounds. If you don't do that, you are cheating yourself out of the meaning of visiting a temple.You don't have to spend time, waste time, lose time or make time. You can just forget time. It doesn't really matter how old the temple is. Smell it, feel it, look out at the view and listen to the sounds of wind and trees.
And don't forget to ask for tea. Many temples have tea service for a few hundred extra yen. You are an aesthete, like the warrior-turned-poet who founded Shisen-do. Eat a small piece of the cookie or whatever sweet they serve, then a sip of tea. Sweet, bitter. Sweet, bitter.
Mango the parrot on my coffee cup. He waits until you get up and go for toast, then you come back and find him like this, sneaking a drink of your coffee. He is South American, after all. Long time no see, Mango. My mom painted that cup.
It's snowing hard again this morning. From Friday afternoon to Monday morning, I don't think it stopped raining and snowing for even an hour. It should be springtime now. Are we going to see snow on the cherry blossoms? It happens from time to time. A lot of people will be arriving in town this week for the World Water Forum starting this weekend, so I hope the weather is good for them, and for Peter's geisha tours.
Where is Raed?
From the site:
:: Sunday, March 09, 2003 ::
A BBC reporter walking thru the Mutanabi Friday book market (again) ends his report with :
"It looks like Iraqis are putting on an air of normality"
Look, what are you supposed to do then? Run around in the streets wailing? War is at the door eeeeeeeeeeeee! Besides, this ?normality? doesn?t go very deep. Almost everything is more expensive than it was a couple of months ago, people are digging wells in their gardens, on the radio yesterday after playing a million songs from the time of the war with Iran (these are like cartoon theme songs for people my age, we know them all by heart) they read out instructions on how to make a trench and prepare for war, that is after president saddam advised Iraqis to make these trenches in their gardens.
But in order not to disappoint the BBC; me, Raed and G. put on our ?normal? faces and went to buy CDs from Arassat Street in a demonstration of normality. After going first into Sandra?s fruit juice shop and getting what people from foreign would probably call a poor imitation of a banana and apple smoothie, we spent half an hour contemplating the CD racks at music shop. Raed being the master of talk-and-slurp-at-the-same-time technique was trying to steal away my ?normality? by reminding me that I will be wasting my 10,000 Dinars because there will be no electricity for the CD player. I explained to him that I am planning on operating a pirate radio station and need to stock on music for the masses I plan to entertain, said in a matter of fact voice and Raed didn?t even blink which made Mr. music_shop_owner look at us very suspiciously at this point so we moved to the next rack. But since I buy the stuff that would otherwise sit and collect dust he didn?t say much and was very happy to take away 12,500 Dinars. I bought five instead of the planned 4 CDs, many thanks to Malaysian bootleggers for providing us with cheap CDs. The deftones, black rebel motorcycle club, erykah badu and the new amr diab (here for audio clips if you are interested) have joined the Pax Radio CD racks.
Human Shields Bashing #124
"Basically, they said we are not going to feed you any longer," said John Ross, an American who has been active in radical causes since he tore up his draft card in 1964.
Excuse while I wipe the tears from my eyes. Outoutout. He could have at least say something more in line with his ?radical cause?. This is a bit insulting actually for some reason I feel offended. FEED YOU? Why does the Iraqi government have to friggin? feed you, you have volunteered to ?help? in country which can?t feed its own population properly (well it could if it spent a bit less on itself and on people like you ). There is another good bit:
The activists accused the Iraqi authorities of trying to use them as pawns in the war with America.
oh, shockhorror, what a surprise. Back to where you came from. Don?t wait for thank you speeches, outoutout.
The bitter flight from Iraq follows a showdown with the Iraqi authorities who demanded that they decamp from their hotels in central Baghdad and take up their self-assigned roles as civilian protectors.
No no, just stay in your hotels, buy souvenirs and make fun of the backward ways of these Iraqis, hope you sent all your friends postcards telling them about the pita and tahini you have been eating while strolling around Baghdad, you tourists. Did you take enough pictures of children begging in the streets to show your friends back home how much you care about the plight of the poor in the third world. Bet they were all shaking hands and promising to see each other at the next ?worthy cause? party.
Make sure you have reservations if you are coming to Kyoto now through the 23rd, as the World Water Forum will be going on at the Kyoto International Conference Hall
in Takaragaike Park, very near my house. People come to these events from countries all over the world, with different travel budgets, so everything from Western-style luxury hotels to business hotels to ryokan to minshuku to gaijin houses to temple lodgings will likely be bursting at the seams.
The truly awesome 700-year-old kusunoki in front of shoren-in that marks the opposite end of the lamplight promenade for this week's event (see event notice below). There are two of them side-by-side. Every time I go by I have to stop for a while and just marvel at them. Nearby is Chion-in, with supposedly the largest temple gate in Japan, so people are often just hurrying by the trees without even glancing at them. Ironic, because reverence for great works of nature is the essence of Japanese Shinto.
(clicky-zoomy)
2X4 balloon-framing is becoming more popular in Japan (as is prefab), but mainstream Japanese housebuilding is post-and-beam. The lath for plastering is woven strips of bamboo, and the plaster is a nice mix of mud and straw. See that pile on the blue tarp in the left picture. That's it. On the right, you can see it in place the next day.
From March 7 through March 18, the lovely walking route (about 2km?) to Kiyomizu from Shoren-in (past Maruyama, Yasaka) will be lit up evenings 6-10 p.m. by 2,000 bamboo and paper lanterns, as well as Kiyomizu-yaki (pottery) lanterns. Tonight (weather not permitting, it seems) and Saturday the 15th, maiko and geiko (geisha) will be parading the route in jinrikisha (rickshaws). Not to be missed. Here are a couple of pictures of that area.
Looking south toward downtown, the botanical gardens are off to the left.
Shizuya is a bakery/deli that makes great sandwiches, life-transforming sandwiches.
These things stop being funny after a couple of years.
The anticipation reaches a crescendo. It's gonna be biblical.
Rokkaku-dori, a block south of Sanjo and the Museum of Kyoto.
Not content with his colleagues' wait-and-pounce fishing technique, go-isagi-kun decides to try a stick, like the humans. At Kamo river in downtown Kyoto.
It ain't the ice cream truck.
This one is at Kennin-ji near Gion, the first zen temple in Kyoto.
Modern interepretation of Japanese lighting. What is unchanged is that the lights are on the floor. Traditional Japanese lighting is usually down low. Clear the floor as much as possible and put a lamp down there. Quiet and peaceful.
Machiya literally means "townhouse," which is a good translation. This one belongs to a rather famous photographer in Kyoto.
A is for Abraham, the father of Judaism, Islam and Christianity.
B is for Blood, we have less of it than oil.
C is for Chickenhawk, what did you do during the Vietnam War, Mr. President?
War 101 in Orange County Weekly
I couldn't find a Heihachiya image in Google. This can't be the first Heihachiya image on the Internet. This is a ryokan around the corner from my house. The fold-down bench in front of the house is a Kyoto thing. This photo shows only the main building.
It's snowing pretty hard here this morning, enough for another snowman on the balcony.
Suspended sentences for everyone who didn't die in the nuclear accident. Unbelievable. The guys were mixing uranium in ordinary steel buckets, and before they died, said they had no idea what critical mass meant.
I made a postcard chirashi out of this shot before.
Silly navigation from a company that makes DNA test kits and such. Also go back to the home page.
When I posted about the barbershop webcam a few days ago, I came across listings for some user controllable webcams that were interesting. But, it seems that perverts are hijacking these cams and trying to peek in windows within the field of view (at least in the downtown Kyoto cams), thanks to the handy zoom feature. If you watch when someone else is controlling it, they keep going for windows, rather than street scenes. Most pages are in Japanese, but all you have to do is click the animated camera.
Shijo-kiyamachi (click camera icon near top left): here
Listings in English: here
If you click Kotobikihama (a so-called "singing sand" beach on the Japan sea coast of Kyoto Prefecture), I went skinnydipping at the location of the top right camera, and that's where I learned the Japanese expression about not going in the water after Obon, because of kurage (jellyfish). I got stung several times, and in unusual places, but Japanese jellyfisha are really small, just the lightest sting. Interesting, when we went there, my cell was out of range, but now they have live motion webcams.
When you see that post a-standin' up on the stone,
Ain't no shovin', or shiftin' goin' on,
They got a good understandin',
A good understandin',
You know a good understandin', makes everything alright.
Near my house is an abandoned office buiding that looks like it might have housed a financial company of some sort during the bubble economy. I've lived in this neighborhood for three-and-a-half years, and for the entire time this Aston Martin and Rolls Royce have been sitting behind a gate absolutely untouched, open to the elements. Note the weeds growing through the Lagonda's wheel. This week, suddenly, a classic red Jaguar E-type was put in alongside them, as well as a life-size elephant head and hippopotamus, perhaps made of fiberglass. Bizarre.
(Clicky-zoomy)
I wonder how long this tradition goes back. That is, how long has it been socially acceptable?
