On Saturday Anthony got to play in a park with two friends he hadn't seen in a while, kindergarten classmate Monet, and Gen (my friend Zak's boy). The park near Gen's house in Otsu (just over the mountains from Kyoto), ojigaoka park, is wonderful, both for kids to play and for parents to photograph.

The boys gravitated toward destructive play that involved "building" a "road" near where some minor construction was going on. This "road building" mostly involved throwing rocks....

Here's a view from the other side, showing the little construction zone they were violating...

I was curious what it [...]

Sorry for the lack of interesting posts lately... I've been going all out working on my Lightroom plugins lately, and seem to have no time for blogging. The plugins are like black holes.... I've got a new one in the works, and the nearer I get toward being able to release it, the more energy I devote toward reaching that goal, sucking energy away from, well, pretty much everything else.

Anyway, today's (uninteresting) post is about a tree I noticed on the grounds of the Kyoto Imperial Palace park, during a family bike ride two weeks ago. It was a [...]

Last weekend, Anthony went on an overnight trip with Fumie's folks to Okunoshima (大久野島), "Rabbit Island", a small island in the Seto Inland Sea a couple-hour train-ride and a short boat-ride away. The small island has a large population of wild but friendly rabbits that have trained people to visit and feed them.

I didn't know why the island was full of rabbits until I came across its Wikipedia article while trying to figure out how to pronounce its name (大久野島). It's an interesting (and disturbing story), which you can find at that link.

UPDATE: we took Anthony ourselves a [...]

On our visit to the Sanzen-in Temple in the mountains north of Kyoto a couple of weeks ago, at the highest area that we ventured to (where Anthony got his prize for doing the "sticker rally"), there were racks and racks of little "offering" statues, each representing a donation to the temple.....

Each face of each "wall" has 1,500 statuettes, so there are 12,000 statuettes in these four walls, with more in the background. These were the only "offering" things I noticed, which makes a stark comparison to the Fushimi Inari Shrine, in Kyoto's southern mountains, where everything not nailed [...]

This post follows from Secluded Beach on Ishigaki Island, Part I, about our trip to the beach on our second day of a short trip to Ishigaki Island in the far south of Japan. Part I included this picture looking north from our spot on the beach....

We saw only a few people the whole time we were there, including one guy who walked up the beach toward the outcropping seen above, and just disappeared. I wondered what was over there, so I took a stroll.

When we'd first arrived, I'd seen someone way down the beach playing with some [...]