I've got enough backlog of photos I want to share to fill a year's worth of posts, and my running post rate for the last few years is about one post a day, but lately I've just not been interested in writing, so my posts of late have been infrequent. We might, however, get a spike in posts for a while, because today I took a scooter ride into the mountains of northern Nara Prefecture (south of Kyoto, between Kyoto and Osaka), and had a great time, both photographically and personally.

As you can see, there were a bazillion flowers [...]

The final post on my old Yahoo! manager's visit to Kyoto (part 1, part 2). On his last full day in Kyoto we visited the Arashiyama area on the far western edge of the city, and rented small battery-assisted bicycles. We didn't really need the battery assist, but it was nice. 🙂

The sign above (showing a crude illustration of the kamikaze one-way one-man submarine) used to be accompanied by a large marble monument with an engraved photograph, and if I recall, one of the actual subs. An odd thing to find by the side of the street. Now the [...]

As I wrote last week, my former manager at Yahoo!, Mike Bennett, visited town. After seeing his girlfriend and her family off in Tokyo, he returned to Kyoto for a couple of days of touristy stuff with me.

I took the opportunity to try out a slightly-broken Nikkor 50m f/1.2 that I'd picked up on Yahoo! Auctions (which is the eBay of Japan). Even after I add the cost to repair the heavy aperture ring and slight rattle of unknown origin, it'll have been cheaper than buying a new one, but truth be told I bought it because I'd confused [...]

Here are a few more photos from my visit last week to the most excellent Fushimi Inari Shrine in south-eastern Kyoto.

I was surprised to see this price list posted randomly along the path. It lists initial "offering" fees for permission to put up a gate. The amounts range from about US$5,000 for a small gate with 18cm (7") diameter uprights, to about $17,000 for one-foot-diameter uprights. Of course, these are "starting at..." fees, and "the fee may differ according to location", and one suspects that there are annual fees as well. And, of course, one assumes that this does [...]

Mike Bennett, who hired me into Yahoo! in 1997 and who was my manager for the duration of my eight-year tenure there, stopped by Kyoto the other day, and we got together for the visit to the Fushimi Inari shrine (伏見稲荷大社) that I mentioned in my previous post.

Mike's girlfriend, Lauren, had an earlier business trip to Japan, so he joined her for some travel after. Lauren's sister and dad also came.

As I reported in my first post about this shrine several years ago, it has amazing mountain paths lined with thousands of devotional gates...

I hadn't seen Mike [...]