The room I use as my office at home has a layout not good for much of anything but the bedroom it was designed to be, but space is always tight in Japan, so one makes do as best one can. In this case, my desk is "floating" (not up against a wall as I used to have it when I used a different room for my office) and faces a set of floor-to-ceiling closet doors. This unorthodox arrangement allows the rest of the room to be gainfully employed with bookshelves, exercise stuff, and a bigger-than-most-Japanese-houses La-Z-Boy we brought with [...]

If you want visible presence at a shrine or temple, you make a donation and your name is put to something, such as the orange gates of various sizes at the Fushimi Inari Shrine, or affixed under a small statuette as at the Sanzen-in Temple, or engraved into a stone (such as a gravestone, or some kind of offering seen a bazillion times in passing on my blog, such as here and here and here).

Things such as the wooden gates eventually rot, but stone lasts a bit longer, so if you or your ancestors stop paying the annual maintenance, [...]

I've still got lots of photos yet to go through from our trip to Toyama Prefecture (a few hours north of Kyoto) more than a year ago. At the time I noted that it was really snowy, but I need to tone the description down after the massive snowstorms in the US Midwest and East Coast this year.

Still, it was a lot of snow for us, and really pretty, with visits to historic and picturesque villages of Gokayama and Shirakawago.

It was snowing heavily in the afternoon of the third day of the trip, as it had been all [...]

Wow, I can't believe how time has flown. I've had my nose to the grindstone with a new fun little project, and I come up for air to find that five days have passed since my last post. Doh!

Our first full day on Shoudoshima Island during a short end-of-the-year trip was decidedly cold and rainy. After breakfast at our great hotel, we made the windy, windy*  way to the more-populated opposite corner of the island, and the "Angel Road" spot where three small islands are connected to the main island only when the tide is low....

We awoke the other day to find a bit of snow... just an inch or two... but it must have been a long, still, wet snow because the accumulation on the leaves outside our balcony was impressively vertical...