The cold that I've had for the last couple of weeks has finally started to subside, which is good timing (finally!) because it allowed us to make a trip we've been planning for a while, an overnight a few hours north by train to Kanazawa, to see Japanese pop singer Kousuke Atari (中孝介) in concert again. (We've also seen him in Miyajima, twice in Tokyo, in Osaka, and in Takamatsu.)

Anyway, earlier today I was killing time in the hotel lobby after we checked out when applause erupted from the hotel's "wedding chapel", and the couple above emerged. Even at [...]

In the last week or two I've started to notice some early blossoms around town. As far as I know, plum are the earliest, so that's what I assume they are. They tend to have much deeper, richer colors than cherry blossoms, and so can be more striking in one sense, but also more concrete and mortal in another. (Cherry blossoms, on the other hand, when experienced first hand, definitely lean toward "intangible" and "ethereal".)

Last year I posted my first blossom pictures on Valentine's day. It seems that this year I've had a cold pretty much straight since then, [...]

Bamboo floor of the outside walkway at the tea house of the Murin'an gardens, taken last summer when my friends KFC and Verena visited Kyoto.

The next two are stones on the beach of Honohoshi Cove on Amami Ooshima, of the Amami island group in the far south of Japan, about where the East China Sea becomes the Pacific Ocean. The curved stones make a surprisingly calming sound as the waves wash up and down them.

The final one today is also from our trip to the Amami island group, a beach on the southern tip of Kakeroma-jima [...]

Being March already, I thought I'd look forward to Kyoto's cherry-blossom season, which should be ramping up in to full swing in a month or so. The orange blur in the background of the picture above is the Snowy Bridge from a post week ago. Photos in that post were looking down the canal toward where today's photo was taken.

The photos in today's post, of course, were not taken today; they were taken in late April last year after most cherry blossoms in this area were long gone. The blossoms here are of a late-blooming variety that appeared on [...]

Still feeling miserable from my cold, today's post is simply a collection of a few thin-depth-of-field shots. The one above is of a line of posts that forms a wall at the edge of a shrine in the Gion area of Kyoto, each post having the name of a shrine patron. I took it while doing some night cherry-blossom photography. You can see a more conventional shot of the same scene on this Aunt Jeannette In Kyoto post.

The chairs above were awaiting the kids for one of the events at the Preschool Mochi Production day.

Bidding farewell to my [...]