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The kids' tea bottles await their owners, at the preschool Sports Day this past weekend (more about which is presented here).

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On the little trip where I photographed the elderly couple harvesting rice, I was returning to the mountainous area with a lot of terraced riced paddies that I'd visited the week prior with Nils (where the kids had played). I'd returned to try to get some shots from higher up on the mountain, where I envisioned I'd be able look down at a wide expanse of rice paddies splayed out before me.

It turned out that the terrain wasn't that steep, so all but the few closest terraces seemed to blend into one. There were dozens of levels between the [...]

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Looking at my server logs lately, it's clear that people are looking forward to fall, as I can see the popularity of posts like the following bubble higher:

The Color of Kyoto — Desktop Background Kyoto Fall Foliage Desktops Photoshop's "Darken" Blend Mode (and more fall-foliage desktops)

Those three are particularly popular at the moment, mostly via people coming from the search engines' text and image search. As fall gets closer, more and more posts from my Japan, Fall Colors category will become more popular.

Fall hits Kyoto a month or more later than it seems to hit elsewhere in [...]

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The other day I showed an elderly couple harvesting rice from a small field with a small combine. Rice has been farmed a lot longer than combines and gasoline have been around, and it's still common to see rice harvested old-school style, especially small fields.

While on yesterday's drive into the mountains northwest of Kyoto, we came upon such a harvest, where the rice plant is cut and hung, rice kernels still attached....

It's hard to see the actual rice kernels in the shot above, so below is a full-resolution crop from near the center...

I'm not sure the exact [...]

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