This post – #1,392 on my blog – is by far the longest I've ever endeavored to write, and yet at the same time one of the least fulfilling to present.

Great vistas like the Grand Canyon or an old palace find their magnificence in the wide view, in the sum of their parts, but the gardens around the workshop of the centuries-old Nishimura Stone Lanterns find their magnificence in an attention to detail. A wide view can help present a context for something of interest, but this site is definitely a case where the sum of the parts is less than the parts themselves.

This post is about the “uncompelling sum”, not the “magnificent parts”, just to provide a sense of setting that can be referenced from other posts I'm sure I'll write.

Purpose

As I mentioned in “Stonecarver Daizo Nishimura at Work”, we first stopped by at the workshop for permission to visit the gardens, which was readily granted. During the short conversation, I found that the oldest item in the gardens dates from the Kamakura era (1185-1333), when, he told us, stone carving (culture or technology, I'm not sure) was introduced to Japan from Korea. Most items, though, I took it, were produced by him and his forefathers, he being the fifth generation of his family to work at this site.

The gardens are more of a storage area than anything else. Stone carvings like this look best when they are not shiny and new, so storing them outside gives them the desirable weathered patina appropriate to their age. Having convenient paths among the items allows visitors like us to enjoy them, and also acts like a showroom in a manner of speaking. But it's not like they have a storefront with a lot of customers stopping by — they have no sign or storefront or anything visible from the street that identifies the site. I gingerly asked about prices, to which I got a vague “expensive” reply. I guess if you have to ask....

They are pretty much the only place in Japan that does this kind of hand carving exclusively, and are the go-to solution when priceless stone treasures need restoration or repair work.

The area of Kyoto they're in (which wasn't Kyoto back then) is called kitashirakawa (“Northern White River”, incidentally the same small river that flows by my place a couple of miles downstream). It used to have many stone-carving sites, but now there are apparently only three, and no others that do hand-carving work.

The stone in the area was somehow special, but over the years had somehow been depleted — I'm not sure exactly what that means — but next to the workshop they have big moss-covered stacks of it, the last remaining stock in existence. They keep it on hand for when they, or future generations, need to repair old carvings originally done with the stone.

Garden Approach

Their home/workshop is right on the small mountain street that winds its way up toward Hieidaira, over the mountain, then down to Otsu. On one side of the workshop are the stacks of stone mentioned in the previous paragraph, and on the other is a carport for their crane truck...

In the shot above, Paul is almost standing on the cutting wheels seen in the ill-fated quiz I posted at the start of the month. A sliver of road can be seen at the far left, and the background is what I've referred to in other posts as “the side garden.” Like many areas of the small site, we did not have time to explore the side garden at all, though like the other areas we did not explore, a quick glance yielded promise of a bountiful photographic harvest.

At the far right of the shot is a black railing... that's part of their driveway bridge over the shirakawa river that runs behind the house, and leads to what I refer to as “the back garden”.

Just to the right is what looks like some kind of loading zone or assembly area...

Venturing out to the bridge, the view up river isn't too shabby...

The orange bridge in the background leads to the Nitenji Temple, which I would have been writing about these past weeks had we not discovered this hidden gem right next to it. There are also small shrines on the temple site, which is why the bridge is orange.

Finally....... The Back Garden

Cross the bridge, and you enter an entirely different universe.

As I did with the two shots above, and the two shots that lead this post, occasionally among this collection of 51 photos I'll show a photo of Paul, followed by the photo he was taking at the time. (Paul kindly gave me a dump of his memory card, and permission to post any of his photos.) Having the pair can help orientate the different views in one's mind, creating a better sense of context.

Plus, I'm a geek and I think it's fun.

The garden was wedged into the side of the mountain, likely in stages over the generations as needed. It was very haphazard.

The shot above illustrates one of the problems of these photos: it's often difficult to understand the scale (and with many of these pieces, scale is an important part of their beauty).

The beautifully curved “roof” of the item above is about four feet across, as illustrated here.

During a visit to the site one can just wander around and enjoy the details, but photographing the site is a vastly different undertaking. It's all in the composition. The next two shots are from roughly the same position...

The small moss-covered stone ball on top of the item in the foreground had a shape that really drew me in, and though you can't tell much about it from this wide view, I took to referring to it as “the perfect shape”. It's one of the many details of the site that awaits its own post.

At the left of the photo are the three large stone lanterns I labeled “three kings” in the photo before, and behind the furthest is a barely-visible dark blue blob . That dark blue blob is Paul, crouching off on a connecting path...

In the lower-left of that shot you can see the curved, leaf-covered stone water vessel featured in last week's “Paul Barr + Stonecarver's Garden + Lightroom” post....

Several similar curved vessels can be found at the site, distinguished mostly by the moss and/or lichen that adorn them. I'm finding myself increasingly enamored with their shape, and will inquire about prices and cardiac services the next time I visit.

Despite having the exact same white-balance settings, the color mood of the two shots above are wildly different. The light changed from moment to moment with the passing mostly-heavy clouds, and from location to location on the site.

I took a lot of gray-card readings, though I'm not sure it mattered that much because two shots taken seconds apart, when treated with the same white-balance reading, often had very different feelings. In the end, I just had to go with what felt right on an image-by-image basis.

Judging from the back-of-the-camera view when I chimped my shots, the D700's auto white balance cast the scene with a decidedly cold blue feel. The on-site comparison was useful because I could confirm to myself then (as opposed to trying to rely on my ever-fading memory later on) that the feel really was much more orange/green than the camera was showing. I was glad to notice, but it's not something I worried about because I shoot raw format and post-processing white-balance adjustments do not impact final image quality.

I took a WhiBal reading here as well, but the using the correct color balance yields an implausibly orange, deeply green result, so I adjusted toward something that felt more believable to me.

Looking at the large version of the shot gives you the idea that one could spend hours with a macro lens exploring the fine details in the various types of moss. Each piece was different, so one could spend hours on each....

Anyway, back to The Crossroads. On a sum of its parts scale, the site is quite small... the view from The Crossroads back toward the street is decidedly unphotogenic..

But again, while you're actually there, you're paying to the innumerable small details, so the house and workshop and such fade from conscious view. It's only in photos that you really noticed them, which is why great care has to be taken with composition, focus, and depth of field. It's the same anywhere, I suppose, when trying to exclude an ugly telephone pole or utility wire from an otherwise beautiful scene. The mind blocks them out naturally in real life, but they stick out like a flashing neon sore thumb if they make their way into photos.

At the same location, turning to face the mountain....

The blue tarp adds a certain modern feeling, don't you think? 😐

I ventured up that path a bit, but never did make it very far... so much of the site remains to be explored.

The tallest item I found on the site was up this path a bit, though again, scale is an issue.

Sometimes the clutter looked like clutter, and sometimes like art...

The shaped pillar in the center held the leaves featured in the boundless potential post.

The large circular stone at the entrance almost certainly was originally a millstone, for grinding grain. The small central hole was for the rotation shaft, with the outlying smaller holes for handles, like on an old car-window crank. The large hole near the center is where one would feed the grain, which would soon find itself ground and crushed under the weight of the huge slab of rotating stone. You can see a tiny, modern version as the coffee grinder at a Pizza shop we visited last year.

The overhanging leaves near the aforementioned pillar made for their own beauty, separate and additive to the carvings...

There were several large stone cubes with what looked like large, bold Sanskrit carved into the sides. I'm sure it has some significance to Buddhism, but I dunno. Here are two views of the same cube...

The more I look at this photo, the more my brain wants to rebel at its Escheresque properties. The top half of the photo seems normal enough — Paul is looking at the stone lantern between him and the camera — but the bottom half looks as if a shrunken version of Paul has been placed standing directly beside the stone lantern.

Even though I know that the base of the stone lantern extends quite a bit out below the frame, and that the tuft of grass at its base is really quite tall, my brain just can't quite put it all together. Freaky. By the way, congratulations for actually reading this far... I don't think even my mom will actually read the text this far. (-:

I've only scratched the surface of this small but rich site. I hope with these few photos I've been able to give some sense of its layout and the magic it has to offer.... at least the parts we were able to explore.

Continued here...