Oideyasu! Please take off your shoes.
The Hankyu Umeda Department Store will be completely rebuilt over several years beginning this autumn, but the work will be in sections to avoid shutting down the whole thing. The curve of the building against the main intersection of Umeda will be retained, but the building will look thoroughly modern glass and steel to replace the yellow brick landmark. Yukata fashion 2005：http://www.hankyu-dept.co.jp/honten/yukata/trend.html
The Kannon-do and misty garden space with chatsubo at a mountainside temple. You could hardly expect to find this place if you walked right past the gate, but it also has a teahouse and a sanctuary arrayed up the hillside. Don't ask the name and place; I'm going to go back there and get some better photographs.
Mo-An is a cafe and teahouse at the top of Yoshida-yama (actually a large hill) overlooking the city. Surrounded by forest (the name "Mo-An means something like "forested retreat") with views of Mt. Daimonji to the east and downtown to the west, a quiet place for lunch. Handicrafts like blown glass and hand made papers/meishi/jewelry are on sale on a long table down the center.
www.j-blog.com/movies/shirakawa.mov
A short video clip (QT, 15 MB) of the Shirakawa stream in Gion, Kyoto.
We went back to Yoshiko's beautician a few days ago to pick up this calligraphy brush made from some of the hair collected at Gregory's first haircut. As you can see, Greg's full name and birth date are beautifully painted on there by someone who must have very tired eyes after doing a long foreign name. (Thankfully, no extra charge for so many characters.) I wonder if the artisan painted it with a brush made of his/her own child's hair?
For the benefit of my fellow uncouth gaijin who may be in the position of ordering such a first haircut memento calligraphy brush in the future (apparently the company sends brochures to hairdressers, so ask there), I wondered aloud whether we should do next year's nengajou with the brush, but Yoshiko and her stylist told me it's not meant to be used.
For contrast, my mother saved a few locks of my then-blond hair from my first haircut. I don't know why, but she sent me the envelope out of the blue a few years ago, shortly before she died.
sign at Kodomo no Rakuen (Children's Paradise Park). link goes to related recent entry
Hayashiya on the 6th floor high above Sanjo bridge. You shouldn't leave kyoto without treating me to something here.
A century-old photograph of a Taiyuu and apprentices in their finery at the mon of Shimabara from this highly-recommended book by Kyoto Shinbun. Shimabara was the main pleasure quarters of Kyoto until Gion became more popular in the Edo Period.
A small shrine across the street from the Imperial Palace on Karasuma Street.
I got an email at my Gmail account today that was composed and sent in some japanese encoding format other than unicode UTF-8. the result is mojibake that I can't seem to decipher, whether by manually changing the format of the page or by tring to copy the text or source code to some other application. OS X 10.3 Safari.
A Kyoto City-designated Important Cultural Asset on Karasuma St. north of Marutamachi subway station. English services on Sundays at 0830; visitors are welcome.
Greg has graduated to little toddler's sneakers, so I thought for posterity I would get a nice picture of his first shoes, their thinning soles about to shear off.
Scenes from a little festival (mp4 video, 22MB).
Depending on whether your browser handles the fairly new mp4 video format, you may need to save the file to your disk, then play it with QT or VLC player. This is a small neighborhood festival (matsuri) in Kyoto, not one of the big pageants. Children and adults pull or carry portable shrines (mikoshi) around every block, stopping every now and then for age-appropriate refreshments, as seen here. The adults get more and more boisterous as they fill up on beer and sake.
My new mobile phone does video. What else would I use if for but video of my kid playing on a trampoline
