As I mentioned in "What It Looks Like When Tiered Rice Paddies Go to Seed" the other day, I recently took another trip with Shimada-san and Paul Barr to the middle-of-nowhere mountains of Uji City (south-east of Kyoto).

On the way to the first spot we'd marked on the map, while winding through a thin mountain road, we came across an unmarked side road that Shimada-san knew lead to a dam (one dating to a power generator built almost 100 years ago). He knew that the road was closed off at some point along the way, but otherwise we didn't [...]

In "Exquisite Beauty Growing Like a Weed by the Side of the Road" the other day, I noted that while driving through a sparsely-populated village deep in the mountains of Uji City south-east of Kyoto, we made a stop to check out a local shrine we happened upon. The shrine's entrance gate appeared in yesterday's "Scenes From Rural Japan: Mountain Village in Uji City" as well.

The shrine has the name Kiyotakiguu (清瀧宮), and is just a small local shrine for the village, like any number of similarly unassuming local shrines and temples that have appeared on this blog (recent [...]

The trip the other day that produced "Exquisite Beauty Growing Like a Weed by the Side of the Road" was a lazy no-plan drive through some sparsely-populated mountains south-east of Kyoto, in Uji City (famous as the setting for The Tale of Genji, so I hear). Driving on the edge of a small valley, the views of the rice paddies were stereotypical small-village Japan...

This was the first outing of my little lens with a proper monopod. It's the same monopod body I've had for years, but I got rid of the piece-of-crap Manfrotto #3232 head, replacing it with the [...]

I had the most pleasant hospital experience today. (That's not something you hear often!)

For the last 15 years of so I've had occasional bouts of atrial fibrillation (a not-particularly-dangerous arrhythmia, or "irregular heartbeat"), where my heart suddenly can't keep a steady rhythm. In older folks it's often accompanied by tachycardia ("super-fast heartbeat") which is bad, but I've never had that problem, so my A-fib is not directly dangerous. However, if left untreated for more than a day or two, the irregular flow of blood through the heart could allow clots to form, which are directly dangerous, so when it [...]
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During our visit to Pierre Nadeau's smithy in the middle of nowhere of Japan's Wakayama Prefecture, Pierre let me have a go at smithing. He normally makes Japanese swords, but set the bar a little lower for my first try.

He grabbed a length of #3 rebar, which is round with pronounced ridges all along, and told me to square it. The instructions were as simple as the task: put the part you'll work on into the center of the forge and turn on the forge blower. Once the thing is red hot (but before it gets white hot), take [...]