I posted one set of pictures from yesterday's snow in Kyoto, from the morning. I hope some of the pictures were nice, but mostly they were for storytelling – not for their intrinsic beauty – because the lack of beauty in the photos accurately reflected the snowy urban reality of the scene.

However, later in the day, I found myself in northern Kyoto, just before the city ends and the mountains begin, just as a snowstorm ended and a brilliantly rich, blue sky was emerging. This time, my pictures' lack of intrinsic beauty is a reflection of my lack of [...]

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 [...]

It's been a while since I've posted something pretty just for the sake of posting something pretty. I used the photo above to illustrate the Book on Photography that Doesn't Suck in my Good Photographers, Bad Writers post last year.

I came across these flowers outside someone's home, on the way back from the Kyoto Keage Water-Treatment Plant last May, after I'd just about been blinded by the brilliant beauty of a bazillion azaleas.

We took a short trip over the New Year holiday to the Amami Islands of southern Japan, in the East China Sea about halfway between Okinawa and the Japanese mainland.

The map below shows our flight back, from the northern part of the main Amami island (circled in green) to Osaka (circled in blue). Mentally, Amami feels much further away than Hokkaido (circled in Red) where we visited last May, even though the latter is indeed farther away.

When we went to Hokkaido, we took an 18-hour ferry trip, but were almost always within sight of land. The flight back [...]

Winter is fairly blah in Kyoto, color/nature-wise. Kyoto is glorious in autumn and glorious during cherry-blossom season, hellatiously hot and humid in summer, and blah in winter. But one thing it has in winter are red berries of all sorts.

While walking back from the shrine-closing ceremony in mid-November, I noticed some berries growing wild by a small river...

Since then, I've started to see them all over, whether in small plants, on shrubs, or in trees. Here's an old house fronting the river, with large bushes of red berries flanking on either side....

Now that I think about it, [...]