Japan
drorzel | June 14, 2010I've already read three of this year's six Hugo-nominated novels, and am highly unlikely to read two of the remaining three, but since I have voting rights, and want to be as responsible as I can about this, I started on Palimpsest by Cat Valente last night. The language is very rich, and I'm not far enough in yet to tell if it will eventually develop a plot, but I was jarred very badly by one early section, in which a Japanese character visits a Kyoto landmark, the Silver Pavilion:
The temple grounds were deserted. She settled onto the grass a ways off from the great silver temple. She…
drorzel | May 19, 2008Mike Hoye rides the Tokyo subway and takes a picture of it:
Here's my view of the same scene (from this Flickr set):
I really hope he was sitting down when he took that.
drorzel | May 8, 2008In honor of the Japanese crow story in today's Links Dump, here's a filler post with a picture of a Japanese crow:
drorzel | April 25, 2008I'm kicking myself for not using this as a filler post a couple of weeks back when it was Easter:
This is from one of the shrines at Kiyomizu-dera in Kyoto-- the temple with the gigantic wooden platform looking out over the city. The sign at the lower right identifies it:
This stuatue is called "okuninushino-mikoto."
A Japanese god who is in charge of love and good matches
The rabbit beside him is a messenger of the god.
Emmy grumbles that the divine rabbit has a certain Donnie Darko quality to it, but I think she's just jealous that she doesn't have a four-foot-high bunny to play with.
drorzel | April 24, 2008We had a great time on our visit to Japan last summer, but we had one incredibly frustrating experience, on our first day in Yokohama. We couldn't bring three full weeks' worth of clothing with us, so we brought a bit more than one week's worth, and planned to get things cleaned there. The hotel laundry rates were outlandish, so we loaded up a suitcase with dirty laundry, and when we got to Yokohama, we asked directions to a local laundromat (Japanese word: "ko-in ran-da-ri," or "coin laundry"). The nice lady at the hotel desk gave us a tourist map, with a route indicated on it.
This created…
drorzel | April 24, 2008Lest you think that people in the US are uniquely alarmist about threats to Chiiiiillllllldrruuuun, a picture from last summer's trip to Japan:
I have absolutely no idea what that says, but it sure is lurid.
drorzel | April 3, 2008Wow. I'm cranky today.
I really need to be more Zen about things. Here's a picture to meditate on:
This is the famous "Crane and Turtle" garden at Konchi-in in Kyoto. It's one of very few gardens absolutely known to have been designed by the great garden-desing master Kobori Enshu, out of the huge number of gardens attributed to him. It's really quite lovely-- I'm not sure the picture does it justice, but we spent a pleasant while looking at this while waiting for a tour of their art collection.
There, I feel better already.
drorzel | January 2, 2008As a Christmas present for her grandparents, Kate put together a coupld of albums of pictures from our Japan trip, including this shot of What Japanese Commuter Trains Look Like to Me:
(That was taken standing up looking straight ahead on a train from Tokyo to Yokohama. The Japanese have the best trains in the world, but they're not tall.)
Kate has posted all of the pictures from the grandparent albums over on her LiveJournal, along with the extensive captions she wrote for them:
Part 1 (27 pictures)
Part 2 (33 pictures)
Go on over there and take a look.
drorzel | December 28, 2007In the same basic spirit as yesterday's knit cephalopod picture, here's a sign from Takayama that we really liked:
I'm not sure exactly why the octopus has punched the fish to the moon, Ralph Kramden style, but Kate and I got a kick out of it.
I'm also not sure what it says-- something to do with octopus (the first two characters of the top like are "ta ko" which is "octopus" in Japanese), and the first character of the third line generally means "big," but beyond that it's a mystery to me.
drorzel | December 18, 2007There's a chance that, if I make a serious push this week, I can have a first pass through the book complete before Christmas. So, of course, I'm procrastinating madly.
I understand it's traditional to post pictures in these circumstances, so here's one of my favorite shots from the Japan pictures:
This is Kate getting some water out of the awesome dragon fountain at one of the Hongwan-ji temples in Kyoto. They're doing major renovations at the moment, hence the white construction fence, which made a very nice plain background for the dragon, and made this come out really well.
Right. With…
drorzel | December 17, 2007A quick photo poll question: Which of these statues seen on the street in Japan is more disturbing? This chubby nude saxophonist from Himeji:
Or this small child riding a giant carp from Takayama:
Leave your answer in the comments. You can only pick one.
drorzel | December 15, 2007On our first day in Kyoto, Kate and I went to a bunch of temples, including one that was showing a bunch of really cool paintings featuring Buddhist temple accessories come to life and chasing monsters around. They had a sort of demented whimsy to them, and you can get a little flavor of it from the background images in this poster:
Of course, neither of us can read a word of Japanese (well, that's not quite true-- I can spot the character for "temple" in the group at the upper left), so we have no idea what the artist's name is, or anything at all about the show.
I'm sure that somebody out…
drorzel | November 3, 2007I've gotten away from posting Japan pictures, but here's what may be my favorite warning sign ever:
In case you have trouble reading the text in the image:
Stranger whosoever thou art and whatsoever be thy creed, when thou enterest this sanctuary remember thou treadest upon ground hallowed by the worship of ages.
This is the Temple of BHUDDA [sic] and the gate of the Eternal and should therefore be entered with reverence.
I think that's fantastic.
Of course, the tourist shop selling the glow-in-the-dark Buddha keychains was about fifty feet away. Outside the gate, though-- I guess you take…
drorzel | October 15, 2007This is the famous carving of the Three Wise Monkeys on the stable at the Nikko Tosho-gu:
Looking at that suggests a possible question for a non-dorky poll, analogous to the dork classic "what superpower would you want?":
If you could go through life either seeing no evil, hearing no evil, or speaking no evil, which would you pick?
(It's non-dorky because it's a question of ethics and morals, and there's nothing dorky about ethics and morals...)
It would sort of depend in the mechanism by which evil went unseen or unheard-- if it involved some sort of evil suppression field in your…
drorzel | October 6, 2007It's as good an explanation as any for this:
I'm not sure what this particular bit of Engrish is advertising, but I like the poster. It was hanging on a wall in Kamakura when we visited there in the pouring rain.
The original image, and 140 other pictures from Kamakura, can be found in this Flickr photoset.
drorzel | September 30, 2007The selection of a smaller subject area for viewing, and the contrast between the dim interior and the bright exterior really enhance the aesthetic experience of the garden:
What?
That's a picture of the garden at Koto-in, a subtemple of Daitoku-ji in northwest Kyoto, cropped down a bit from the original in this set of pictures. You can also get something of the same effect from a pure outdoor shot:
In this case, a shot through the upper gate at Ninna-ji, also in northwest Kyoto, and part of the same photoset.
drorzel | September 27, 2007The Silver Pavilion:
The Golden Pavilion:
Which do you like better?
I actually have much better pictures of the Golden Pavilion (which can be seen at Flickr), but this is about as good as the Silver Pavilion shots get (see this set), so to make it a fair comparison, I went with the picture above. I'm also inordinately amused by pictures of other people taking pictures of stuff.
To answer a question raised in the previous poll, this is "non-dorky" because it's about making aesthetic judgements, not science stuff. As any smarmy art history major can tell you, science is for dorks, and dorks…
drorzel | September 25, 2007A simple question: We have the Great Buddha at Nara:
and the Great Buddha at Kamakura:
Which is better?
(Unfortunately, that's the best picture I have of the Nara Daibutsu. The camera has a million different modes, selected by a clicky wheel on the top, and the wheel kept getting spun to odd settings as I put the camera in and out of the case. The other shots I took in Nara were all blurry, because it was on some low-light-level setting and took really long exposures.)
drorzel | September 24, 2007I was just reminded again of a mysterious thing in Yokohama, that some readers may be able to help with. One of the first nights we were in Yokohama, I went up to the bar on the 70th floor, just to see what it was like. I was neither cool enough nor rich enough to really be there, but they let me sit at the bar and listen to the jazz band they had playing.
When I sat down, I asked the bartender what sort of draft beer they had, and he said "Budweiser." I said "I see a tap over there that says "Guinness," so bring me a Guinness."
Then I watched him go to a cooler, take out a bottle, and pour a…
drorzel | September 23, 2007Some time back, I proposed a contest:
The person who comes closest to the actual number [of pictures taken in Japan] without going over will win something cheap and tacky from Japan that I will buy before I leave.
I haven't fogotten about this, I've just been too busy to do all that much with the pictures. But we do have a winner, of this priceless artifact:
The total number of pictures I took on the trip was 1,508 (or, at least, that's the total number I ended up with-- I distinctly remember taking some pictures at one temple in northwest Kyoto, but they're not on either of the memory…