Next Saturday is shichi go san – "7 5 3" – a traditional festival celebrating kids aged 7, 5, and 3 years old. (It's taking a will of steel to refrain from the pun of calling this festival "odd".) Wikipedia has a short little writeup describing it, how often it's the first time for kids to dress up in fancy kimono (girls) or hakama (boys), and such.

Although it's not until next week, this past weekend found the Heian Shrine filled with kids all dressed up and cute as a button. My friend Thomas, in town just for the weekend, [...]

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I've mentioned recently how much I love the natural roofs of many temples and shrines, having noted it in recent posts about the Fushimi Inari Shrine and about the Kiyomizu Temple. The roof above, like the roofs cited in those posts, are made of many layers of thin sheets of what I assume is wood. Such a roof, over time, slowly breaks down and returns to nature.

Here's a relatively new one, as evidenced by the sharp shadows showing that the individual sheets of wood are still easily distinguishable as, well, individual sheets of wood....

It's not so new that [...]

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The photo below, of pizza at a cafe, appeared on my previous post. It was taken with a polarizing filter on the lens adjusted to block glare from the window in the background. Mouseover the "Without Polarizer" button below for the same scene two seconds later, without the filter...

With Polarizer   -   Without Polarizer mouseover button to see that image

The difference is striking.

Without the filter, the reflections on the pizzas, table, and glasses of water just destroy the scene. I'm glad I happened to have brought the my polarization filter that day. In the "Without Polarizer" [...]

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I spotted this snail on a small tiled "roof" on top of a short wall outside Giouji Temple in western Kyoto. He seemed quite photogenic, as did the wall. Gioujo temple has all kinds of pretty walls of various different constructions, although this external wall (seen in the left of this picture) is likely the least interesting.

Most of the old nails put in to secure the tiles were sticking out like this one. Perhaps the wood underneath got wet, expanded, and squeezed the nail out? It seemed quite odd to me.

The temple itself is small and not very [...]

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In my running set of posts about my visit to the Fushimi Inari Shrine in south-east Kyoto, I showed the paths lined with thousands of gates that the shrine is famous for, but I ended the most recent installment – Fushimi Inari Shrine: Foxes, Treasure, and More with the teaser that there was so much more than just the gates.

We didn't have a map, so we took what turned out to be a side path that later looped back to the main path....

It was great luck to take this side path, because in doing so we discovered a [...]

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