A short followup to my post the other day about Japanese candles to mention that Alice Gordenker's Japan Times article is now online, as well as her blog post with more details.

Also, on YouTube, I found a video of someone with 50 years experience making a batch of Japanese candles, best seen after having read Alice's article and then her blog.

And finally, one more shot of the one of the setups I mentioned in my first post.

I seem to have neglected to post the answer to the "Curved-Wire "What am I?" Quiz", a photo similar to the one above, so here it is.

It's an empty shoe rack at Anthony's elementary school. There are two sets... one for the street shoes left at the entrance...

... and one for the shoes worn inside the school...

I made a trip to the Todaiji Temple (東大寺) in Nara last month. Nara was the capital of Japan 1,300 years ago.

The main temple building is a massive wooden structure built toward the end of the 1600s (though much smaller and less ambitious than the original building long destroyed by fire). Until recently, it was the largest wooden structure in the world.

Interesting to me was that the main columns were not individual tree trunks, but somehow crafted from component parts. The wooden boards comprising the exterior of each column can be seen in the photo above, but I [...]

I've long enjoyed the "So, What the Heck is That?" column each month in The Japan Times (Japan's main English-language daily), written by Alice Gordenker. As the titles of my blog posts that reference her articles indicate, the subject can become quite wacky:

Somewhere over the years we became acquainted by email, and somehow last month I ended up doing the photography for her next column, on the decidedly non-wacky (but unexpectedly interesting) subject of Japanese candles, scheduled to appear in the paper and online next week (Update: here it is). I've been wanting to write this up this since [...]

This is the third (and final) post about the annual lightup event in the bamboo forest of the Aarashiyama area of Kyoto, which I went to on a windy, sleety night a couple of weeks ago. (See earlier part 1 and part 2.)

The photo collected the many flashes of others' cameras during the 30-second exposure. Here's a crop from the center of the shot above...

I tried a quick shot directly of one of the lanterns, which ended up as one might expect, detail in the bright light completely blown out. Still, somehow the result appeals to me...

It's [...]