Not quite a regulation baseball uniform, but appropriate to the situation. Last month some neighborhood kids were playing catch, with the twist that they were separated by a little river, adding a bit of drama to each throw...

It's not that I don't have enough recent stuff that I'm behind on to post about, but I thought it'd be a nice change of pace to jump back half a year to when the fall foliage first started showing its colors in the area, to a November 9th visit to the Kongourinji Temple (金剛輪寺) in Shiga, an hour's drive from Kyoto. This is the same temple featured in "Deep Sorrow at the Kongourinji Temple's Path of Jizou", about the many bibbed statues representing children who died before their parents.

The fall colors don't arrive in full force this area [...]

Here are a few random pictures from the colorful Towel Museum in Imabari Japan, which I covered in a couple of posts last month (part one and part two). The towel giraffe above is a smaller version of the one Anthony is hugging in this photo from part one.

The displays of wares for sale at the many shops were always colorful...

I was thinking of using this picture as one of my "What am I?" quizzes, but it's probably not challenging enough, so I'll just post it here, and the answer follows later in this post.

The big wall [...]

While in Pierre Nadeau's smithy that I wrote about yesterday, I noticed this odd-looking tool lying around, and like many of the odd-looking things lying around the 100-year-old workshop, I had no clue what it was (unlike the majority who answered the "What am I?" quiz correctly the other day).

When I asked Pierre about it, he demonstrated that it conditions a grinding wheel used for sharpening knives and the like. I don't think he uses it when he makes swords, but he also makes various tools on order, so I'm sure his grinding wheel gets a lot of use.

As I noted in last week's "A Little Cold-Forging Metal Work", I recently visited a craftsman in the art of traditional Japanese swordmaking.

I have no interest in swords as weapons, historical items, or even as pieces of art (such as seen in "A Few Japanese Swords of Note"), but I find how they're made to be facinating. (See this video for a superficial overview.)

Later this month, Pierre, a Canadian working in Wakayama, Japan, will take the test to be an officially licensed Japanese swordsmith. If he passes, he will be only the second non-Japanese in history to do [...]