In my post yesterday about Japanese archery, I concentrated on the short moment each of the 2,000+ archers got during Sunday's day-long event (第62回 三十三間堂大的全国大会) at the Sanjusangendo Temple. Except in the world of calm and concentration that they brought with them for that moment on the shooting platform, the event was an absolute madhouse, with way too many people packed into way too small an area, funneled through an even thinner bottleneck entrance path connecting the archery area with the main temple grounds.

It was absolutely ridiculous, and at one point early on I felt so bad for friends [...]

As I mentioned in yesterday's "Traditional Archery Like a Boss" post, I made my first visit to the annual tooshiya archery event (第62回 三十三間堂大的全国大会) at the Sanjusangendo Temple in Kyoto, a half-hour walk from my place.

Japanese archery, kyuudou, is a discipline -- neither purely sport nor art -- comparable in one sense to karate or tea ceremony in that the result is not nearly as important as the perfection in the steps taken toward the result. Yesterday's event was my first introduction to it (the only other archery I've seen in Japan is the yabusame mounted archery event I [...]

I went to the tooshiya archery event for the first time, held annually at the Sanjusangendo Temple in Kyoto today. The official name of the event is 「第62回 三十三間堂大的全国大会」. Mostly it's for ranked archers who have turned 20 years old this past year (and there were 2,132 that took part today), but this was one of a couple dozen instructors who got to shoot, and who ended up placing.

Having hauled a massive lens around all day, I got home to find that I was more exhausted than I ever recall. After an hour's power nap and a hot bath, [...]

After what's turned out to be a monochromatic year so far, I'm happy to get some color back in my blog. The fall-foliage season is Kyoto's most glorious, and it runs a long six or seven weeks, so I've got more fodder for posts than I could actually process, so I'll dip in for today's post about a stroll around Kyoto's Mt. Yoshida that I did with some friends (Stéphane Barbery, Nicolas Joannin, and Paul Barr) last month.

I've posted about this area many times, starting in "Discovering Kyoto's Mt. Yoshida" several years ago after Stéphane first introduced the area [...]

I've been taking it easy this year because I'm still recovering from the cold I woke up with on 1/1, but after posting Paul Barr's inspired creation yesterday, I thought I'd look into my own photo archive to see what I was doing when he took that photo. I was standing next to Paul, but aiming my camera at a the sliding walls of a nearby building, with the thought that it might make a nice desktop background.

One thing I like about it is that even though it's full of detail, it's not necessarily clear right away what you're [...]