Archive for the 'Japan' CategoryPosts relating to Japan and things Japanese
Today I visited eastern Kyoto's Chishaku-in Temple (智積院) with Paul Barr and Nicolas Joannin. I'd driven by its large temple grounds hundreds of times, but had never stopped in, and perhaps couldn't have picked a better day. It was the first short-sleeve day of the year, and the open grounds were dotted with all kinds [...]
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I recently had the pleasure to tour Suntory's "Yamazaki" whisky distillery, 20 minutes by train south of Kyoto. Dating from 1923, it's the oldest whisky distillery in Japan. (Wikipedia - home page) Suntory uses the British "Whisky" spelling, rather than the Irish/American "Whiskey", so I'll do the same in this post. 20 years ago I [...]
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There were plenty of folks enjoying the blossoms, but it was quiet and relaxed, nothing at all like the ugly, disgusting spectacle you so often find (that I wrote about seven years ago in "The Ugliness of Japanese Cherry-Blossom Viewing"). It wasn't even like "Cherry-Blossom Joie de Vivre in Kyoto". It was just a normal [...]
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Dark buds have been slowly making the cherry-tree branches bumpy, but today they suddenly erupted with color. No blossoms as of yet, but the color is clearly there where yesterday there was none. The blossoms are quite late this year. Comparing to the my cherry-blossom timelapse from 2007, this year seems to be about five [...]
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I had a small but tasty get-together the other day with some friends, including recent graduates of the school I wrote about the other day in "Kyoto Butsugen College of Massage". This was at Uroko (鱗), a restaurant near the corner of Shijo/Kawaramachi in Kyoto, that I really like for their 蛇の目焼き (janomeyaki) grilled chicken, [...]
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Some random desktop backgrounds in my photo library from the past year. I used these as practice with the new render engine in Lightroom 4, which I like but am not completely used to yet. Often, a photo here is from some trip or event that I already blogged about; the "nearby photos" link under [...]
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So picking up from my previous post about the Kyoto Marathon （京都マラソン２０１２), once the runners started arriving, I practiced taking photos. The depth of field with this lens is so incredibly thin that it's only luck that I got anything, but like hitting the lottery to get something so close like the next shot: It [...]
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Not far from the temple where the Japanese archery event I've been posting about was held, there's a college of massage called Kyoto Butugen (京都仏眼鍼灸理療専門学校). It's closer to the American idea of physical therapy than "massage".... words like "relaxation" and "aromatherapy" have no place here. The doctors (which in this case are students in a [...]
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As I mentioned in my previous post, yesterday was the Kyoto Marathon （京都マラソン２０１２). I thought it'd be a fun experience to photograph, to see what I could come up with. The first challenge was to pick a location along the 42-kilometer course that was both photogenic and accessable. (Huge swaths of the city were shut [...]
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Today was the Kyoto Marathon （京都マラソン２０１２). The guy above, looking remarkably affable and relaxed, was not only leading the race at the 35km mark (about 80% of the way done), but had a full 30-second lead on second place, and more than a minute on third. I have no idea whether he ended up winning [...]
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Taking a break from the craziness that ensued for me yesterday when Lightroom 4 was released, I thought I'd pick up from last month's "Setsubun Festival at the Heian Shrine: Intense Burn Begins". Once the blaze was going in earnest, they started throwing bundles of wooden slats into the fire, each slat with someone's wish [...]
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I continue to be busy getting my Lightroom Plugins ready for the next release of Lightroom 4 (the real thing if not another beta)... I just don't seem to have the energy to much else, but I hate not posting every day, much less every week(!) So for something easy to post today, I just [...]
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It's been a while since I last posted about the traditional Japanese archery event that I attended last month. I left off a while ago with "Traditional Japanese Archery: More Ladies, Part 2", and you can see all the posts about the event via any of the "nearby photos" link under each picture. The main [...]
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Among the photos on "Intense Burn Begins", my most recent post about the Setsubun festival at the Heian Shrine earlier this month, was Ripples, showing a thin slice of focus in the tumultuous heated hair near the burning pyre. This post is a bunch more of the same, just 'cause I think it's interesting. What [...]
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Continuing with posts about the Setsubun Festival at the Heian Shrine (Kyoto, Japan) earlier this month, following on from "Attack (and Repulsion) of the Evil Spirits" and "Beans of Good Fortune", we move on to the bonfire event. I covered the same event four years ago in "Intense Burn: Shinto Rite at the Heian Shrine", [...]
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Still busy working on Lightroom plugins, so just a short post today on the next phase of the Setsubun festival last week at the Heian Shrine. After demons representing the ills of the past year were banished, the next step was wishing good forutune for the next year with another bean-centric event. I posted about [...]
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Continuing from this weekend's Setsubun Festival at the Heian Shrine in Kyoto, with nasty demons 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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