Today was one of those "Why I Hate Living in Kyoto" days.

We awoke to a touch of fresh snow this morning, so Anthony and I headed out to play in it for an hour before he had to go to school. His play involved knocking snow off of anything that held it, and mine involved a Nikon D200 and a 17-55 f/2.8 zoom.

I took 249 pictures, of which 228 avoided the cutting room floor (including the iffy crow and snow shot I posted earlier). Of those that survived, there must be about 50 that are – to me [...]

You may recall (from my shrine-closing ceremony post last fall) photos of a Shinto rite of hope and good fortune of some sort, involving the burning of small sticks that had people's names and ages on them. As the sticks burned, the wishes and hopes of the person rose with the smoke (to the gods, I guess).

As I hinted with the Hot Stuff post the other day, this rite was done as part of the Setsubun events at the Heian Shrine.

At the shrine-closing ceremony, perhaps 60 sticks were burnt. At the Heian Shrine this past Sunday, about 40,000 [...]

The Heian Shrine (a huge shrine in eastern Kyoto) had Setsubun events today (Wikipedia on "Setsubun"). The main event associated with Setsubun is mamemaki – 豆撒き, literally "bean scattering" – which involves throwing dried beans at demons while yelling "demons out! Good fortune in!"

As you might expect of any event that involves the throwing of beans, kids love it.

Kids love it unless they think the demons are real...

The demons eventually headed up toward the main building of the shrine, where unbeknownst to them, beans awaited.

The parent in me was surprised at how few children attended the [...]

Today was one of those "I hate where I live" days (in Kyoto, Japan) that I seem to be having a lot lately. A simple visit with some friends to the "Fall-colors Festival" at the preschool of one of their friends turned into a veritable feast of indulgent photographic delights.

The fall colors have been creeping up for the last couple of weeks, as I've shown in a few posts (here, here, here, and here), but it's definitely not yet even near peak. Still, there are some wonderful spots of color, and many of them are at the Eikando Temple [...]