As I wrote last week, my former manager at Yahoo!, Mike Bennett, visited town. After seeing his girlfriend and her family off in Tokyo, he returned to Kyoto for a couple of days of touristy stuff with me.

I took the opportunity to try out a slightly-broken Nikkor 50m f/1.2 that I'd picked up on Yahoo! Auctions (which is the eBay of Japan). Even after I add the cost to repair the heavy aperture ring and slight rattle of unknown origin, it'll have been cheaper than buying a new one, but truth be told I bought it because I'd confused [...]

Here are a few more photos from my visit last week to the most excellent Fushimi Inari Shrine in south-eastern Kyoto.

I was surprised to see this price list posted randomly along the path. It lists initial "offering" fees for permission to put up a gate. The amounts range from about US$5,000 for a small gate with 18cm (7") diameter uprights, to about $17,000 for one-foot-diameter uprights. Of course, these are "starting at..." fees, and "the fee may differ according to location", and one suspects that there are annual fees as well. And, of course, one assumes that this does [...]

Mike Bennett, who hired me into Yahoo! in 1997 and who was my manager for the duration of my eight-year tenure there, stopped by Kyoto the other day, and we got together for the visit to the Fushimi Inari shrine (伏見稲荷大社) that I mentioned in my previous post.

Mike's girlfriend, Lauren, had an earlier business trip to Japan, so he joined her for some travel after. Lauren's sister and dad also came.

As I reported in my first post about this shrine several years ago, it has amazing mountain paths lined with thousands of devotional gates...

I hadn't seen Mike [...]

Some friends are in town, and I joined them on a visit to the Fushimi Inari Shrine in south-west Kyoto this morning. I'd last visited three years ago (see "Kyoto's Dazzling Fushimi Inari Shrine", and followups here, here, and here), and it seems that much has changed since: it's undergoing a massive renovation.

The new paint was positively blinding in its richness, including the multi-colored detail seen in the first photo. I think I prefer the weather-beaten look that centuries tend to put on wooden structures, but the fresh-paint brilliance today was interesting and (for me so far) unique.

As [...]

These first two photos, from a side area at Kyoto's Sennyuji Temple, probably don't look like much in the thumbnails here on the blog, but clicking through to larger versions and they have a certain "presence", especially the first one. Or maybe it's just me, but I like them.

One side held a quaint little rest area...

The ceiling was woven (bamboo, I suppose)...

Wandering further around the fringes of the huge-but-ill-defined temple area, I came across a sub temple with a nice entrance garden...

One of its buildings has a wide veranda with a roof of exposed beams, that [...]