Archive for the 'Japan' CategoryPosts relating to Japan and things Japanese
Continuing from this weekend's Setsubun Festival at the Heian Shrine in Kyoto, with nasty daemons representing the ills of the past year, being banished in the hope of a better year to come... I captioned the third picture with "Door, slightly misleading" because, as you can see in the final photo, what look like door [...]
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Today was the Setsubun festival at the Heian Shrine, so I walked over to snap some pictures. I'll post and write more another day, but today just a few photos. (For an introduction to the event, see my "Setsubun and Mamemaki: Driving out the Demons" post from four years ago.) The picture above is from [...]
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Wow, time flies... now that there's a Lightroom 4 beta out, I'm really ramping up the work to upgrade my Lightroom plugins appropriately, and have barely had time to come up for air, and so I was a bit surprised when I noticed today that it's been five days since my previous post. So, here's [...]
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Picking up from my "Badass Japanese Archery: Now It's The Ladies' Turn" post the other day, here are some more of the very colorful young ladies at the shooting platform. As described in "Total Discipline: Anatomy of a Japanese Archer's Shot", each archer goes at her own pace, but each group of a dozen starts [...]
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In yesterday's "Colorful Ladies' Wardrobe" post we looked at some of the young ladies preparing for their turn at traditional Japanese archery at the rite-of-passage event described in "Total Discipline: Anatomy of a Japanese Archer's Shot". Before and after their turn they were as lively as you'd expect a bunch of twenty-year-old girls to be, [...]
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My recent coverage of the traditional Japanese Archery event described last week in "Total Discipline: Anatomy of a Japanese Archer’s Shot" has so far covered mostly the guys (such as with the previous post, "More Badass Japanese Archery"), but there were about as many gals as guys. Most of the time I was at the [...]
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During the Japanese-Archery event last week that I've been posting about, after the 2,000+ young adults did their thing, a few dozen instructors also got to shoot. I don't know how they were chosen to participate... perhaps it's only the instructors of the kids who hit the target? Anyway, as last week's "Total Discipline: Anatomy [...]
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Continuing with the rite-of-passage Japanese-archery event I've been posting about (第62回 三十三間堂大的全国大会) , after being driven out by the oppressive crowds at the shooting range, I spent some time with the more-manageable crowds in the greater temple compound. I took the three shots above before having ventured into the scrum at the shooting range, but [...]
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In my post yesterday about Japanese archery, I concentrated on the short moment each of the 2,000+ archers got during Sunday's day-long event (第62回 三十三間堂大的全国大会) at the Sanjusangendo Temple. Except in the world of calm and concentration that they brought with them for that moment on the shooting platform, the event was an absolute madhouse, [...]
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As I mentioned in yesterday's "Traditional Archery Like a Boss" post, I made my first visit to the annual tooshiya archery event (第62回 三十三間堂大的全国大会) at the Sanjusangendo Temple in Kyoto, a half-hour walk from my place. Japanese archery, kyuudou, is a discipline -- neither purely sport nor art -- comparable in one sense to karate [...]
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I went to the tooshiya archery event for the first time, held annually at the Sanjusangendo Temple in Kyoto today. The official name of the event is 「第62回 三十三間堂大的全国大会」. Mostly it's for ranked archers who have turned 20 years old this past year (and there were 2,132 that took part today), but this was one [...]
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After what's turned out to be a monochromatic year so far, I'm happy to get some color back in my blog. The fall-foliage season is Kyoto's most glorious, and it runs a long six or seven weeks, so I've got more fodder for posts than I could actually process, so I'll dip in for today's [...]
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This year has gotten off slowly for me, having woken up January 1st with a cold and all, but with "Inspired Artistic Temple Shot" and its followup, "Simple Temple Sliding Wall", I seem to have a black-and-white theme going, so I'll continue that today with a post about charcoal, from last year's visit to Japanese [...]
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I've been taking it easy this year because I'm still recovering from the cold I woke up with on 1/1, but after posting Paul Barr's inspired creation yesterday, I thought I'd look into my own photo archive to see what I was doing when he took that photo. I was standing next to Paul, but [...]
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Rarely does a photo take my breath away, but this rendition by Paul Barr does it every time I come across it. I don't know what it is about it, but if you'll excuse the pun, I'm really drawn to it. Paul recently got an iPhone 4s, and to compliment its camera he loaded a [...]
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I posted the other day about the wonderful and moody Kosanji Temple (高山寺) -- commonly referred to, in error, as the "Kozanji" Temple -- in the north-west mountains of Kyoto. Part of the mood was the really dynamic weather... brilliantly sunny above the high canopy of the towering pines, punctuated by dark clouds and fits [...]
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On the way home from the park with Anthony, I noticed preparations for the new-year hatsumode "first visit to the shrine". As happens every new year, the street leading to the Heian Shrine will be closed off for several days, and the sidewalk lined with food vendors. The preparations that I noticed were for the [...]
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Earlier this month, on the wonderful day in Kyoto's Takao area that I mentioned in the rainbow post a few weeks ago, we visited two temples. I posted a few scenes from the first in "On The Path To Northwest Kyoto's Shingoji Temple", and while I have a bazillion more from there that I want [...]
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A month ago in "Another Day of Amazing Fall Colors in Kyoto" I posted on photo similar to the one above, from that day's trip to the Imakumano Kannonji Temple (今熊野観音寺) in eastern Kyoto. The tree with the red leaves had particularly impressive colors, but only when viewed from about where the group is standing. [...]
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On paper, the Japanese economy is in the dumps, but from what I can tell, it's really cooking. As I noted last month, I've been using my own feet as a mode of transportation lately. Having had errands near the corner of Kyoto's Sanjo and Karasuma streets a few times in the last week, I've [...]
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