The final post on my old Yahoo! manager's visit to Kyoto (part 1, part 2). On his last full day in Kyoto we visited the Arashiyama area on the far western edge of the city, and rented small battery-assisted bicycles. We didn't really need the battery assist, but it was nice. 🙂

The sign above (showing a crude illustration of the kamikaze one-way one-man submarine) used to be accompanied by a large marble monument with an engraved photograph, and if I recall, one of the actual subs. An odd thing to find by the side of the street. Now the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The first photo in yesterday's "Roofs and Rock Gardens at Kyoto's Sennyuuji Temple", the first photo shows the view from the entrance that I'd happened upon as I'd wandered the general area. It turns out it was a small side entrance, with just a small hut with a fee-collecting monk inside. (The hut can be seen at the left of the first photo of that post.)

Above is a view of the entrance and the hut, both sitting under the sprawling canopy of a perfectly-shaped maple brimming with the vibrant green of spring. It was gorgeous (though looks like a [...]