Part of Aunt Jeannette's tour of Kyoto was a visit to a tea room to experience Japanese sweet making. The tour guide not only let me tag along, but let me enjoy the events as well, so I got to see the sweets being made, take some pictures, and then eat them. 🙂

The sweet maker is master Ji'ichiro Kunieta (國枝治一郎), who has been specializing in a particular genre of sweets for 40 years, taking over from his father as the fourth generation of a shop, Matsuya (松彌), started by his great-grandfather in 1888. It's apparently quite famous, as a search of the name brings up quite a bit.

For the demonstration, he made a hydrangea-shaped sweet with a sweet-bean center. He also brought along what's apparently his most famous sweet, a goldfish in gelatin. The tea house hosting the event provided both hot and cold teas, for a wonderful little stack.

Sweets tend to be highly seasonal, and this is the season for both hydrangea and goldfish. In fact, at the moment, we have hydrangea at the livingroom window (as can be seen in the background of these pictures.

The gelatine one represents the water with two fish and a lily pad. You can see some goldfish in the picture below, sort of. It's the view we had out the window of the tea house, and in the river at the bottom of the frame you can see an orange haze... a school of little goldfish.

The little bridge in the photo below is where I took the first shot shown in my Night Cherry Blossoms in the Gion area of Kyoto post two months ago, and is in the same immediate area as these Night Long-Exposure Gion Cherry-Blossoms shots.

Leaning a bit out the window, the river ran right beside the tea room...

In preparing this post, it took me several hours to figure out the name of the sweets shop, having only the photos showing the name on his shirt and hat. It turns out that the form of the second character used in that embroidery is a nonstandard form not in any dictionary I could find, online or otherwise. I eventually found a reference to him and his sweets after trying all kinds of web searches consisting of terms like (the Japanese versions of) “Kyoto”, “Nijo”, “Sweets”, “Matsu”, “goldfish”, and “hydrangea”. He's near Nijo-Kawaramachie (in Kyoto, Japan, of course)

Having spent those several hours tracking him down, and finding that he was fairly close, I felt obliged to treat myself to some more of his sweets, so picked some up on the way home from Anthony's Jumping gymnastics class. They await me in the fridge now. 🙂