As I mentioned in “What It Looks Like When Tiered Rice Paddies Go to Seed” the other day, I recently took another trip with Shimada-san and Paul Barr to the middle-of-nowhere mountains of Uji City (south-east of Kyoto).

On the way to the first spot we'd marked on the map, while winding through a thin mountain road, we came across an unmarked side road that Shimada-san knew lead to a dam (one dating to a power generator built almost 100 years ago). He knew that the road was closed off at some point along the way, but otherwise we didn't know what to expect, so checked it out.

Eventually the road did end just past a little village of perhaps half a dozen houses, so we did a U-turn and parked to soak up the quiet, peaceful vibe.

The paddies in this area had been abandoned, but relatively recently, unlike the ones in my previous post.

We parked at a wide spot in the road past the final house of the village, next to a plot of land being gardened by a pleasant gentleman who happened to be there at the time (one of perhaps four people we saw the entire time in the tiny village).

It was eminently pleasant just to take in the scenes from the end of the road. The final house was fronted by a formidable wall common in country houses...

The house itself was not actually visible, set back behind the fronting wall, but the wall and entrance itself was picturesque enough, including a floral-shaped window...

The entrance proper was quite high above the level of the road, with ramps leading up. Standing in front I held the camera above my head and blindly shot, hoping I'd get a nice layered look....

That photo didn't come out quite as I hoped, but this little are was rich with the kind of geometric patterns that I like for desktop background, so here are a few...

I had high hopes for that last one, along the lines of the “Fence and Vine” from five years ago that I still really like, but I think this one fell flat because I was too close. I should have tried the same shot with the 125mm Voigtländer.

Directly across the road were the unused rice paddies, now covered with grass and starting to sprout some weeds...

... and beyond it was another farmstead...

Looking further back toward the village...

Back on the side we were parked, growing next to the old farmstead I noticed a big juicy berry that my Voigtländer couldn't stay away from...

An attractive point to this berry was that it was at eye level, owing to the raised nature of the house relative to the road, but it turns out it's good for comparison to a less-accessible ground-level berry I photographed when I first stepped out of the car....

I didn't notice at the time that they were different... this odd one is really odd... I've never seen anything like it. Perhaps I just don't inspect berries very closely....

Is this the same kind of berry at a different stage?

Looking across again at a building on the opposing farmstead, here's the same view with three different lenses...

Before moving back through the village, I took a shot of one of the many little hand-made pinwheels that dotted the small garden plots, ostensibly to scare away birds, I suppose....

They made quite a racket when the wind kicked up. All were made from beer cans or the like.

Continued here...

I went on an outing today again with Shimada-san and Paul Barr, to the deep rural mountains of Uji City, southeast of Kyoto. We went a week ago and had a wonderful time, though I've barely had a chance to look over that day's photos. (From that day I've posted only a few flowers, some small-village farming scenes, and a bunch of shots from a small local shrine.) Today we went on some different roads and discovered even more remote, more pleasant areas. It was wonderful.

The photo above, of a set of tiered rice paddies that had been disused long enough for a tree to grow in them, came after I'd taken a short path from the road through a dense bamboo forest. It's not much to look at in the small version, but has somewhat of a “presence” when it fills the screen, I think.

Continued here...

In “Exquisite Beauty Growing Like a Weed by the Side of the Road” the other day, I noted that while driving through a sparsely-populated village deep in the mountains of Uji City south-east of Kyoto, we made a stop to check out a local shrine we happened upon. The shrine's entrance gate appeared in yesterday's “Scenes From Rural Japan: Mountain Village in Uji City” as well.

The shrine has the name Kiyotakiguu (清瀧宮), and is just a small local shrine for the village, like any number of similarly unassuming local shrines and temples that have appeared on this blog (recent ones I can recall offhand include the Himuro shrine, Takanawa Temple, Juge Shrine, Ochiba Shrine, Hiyoshi Shrine, Nitenji Temple, Sokushouji Temple, and Toufuu Shrine).

These unassuming local places are quite different from the large famous shrines and temples like the Kongourinji Temple, Heian Shrine, Sanzen-in Temple, Yoshiminedera, Eikando Temple, Yoshida Shrine, and Nanzen Temple, but each has its own charms, and I enjoy checking them out, the more remote the better.

This one was a two-minutes walk up a winding set of stairs up the side of a mountain...

At the left you can see a small shed with blueish doors. Coming from the shed is a track that leads up to the shrine, for some kind of conveyor to bring heavy things up and down...

The track is, of course, the answer to the “Bumpy-on-the-Bottom What-am-I? Quiz” from the other day.

Once you get up there, you find a small compound with minor buildings on three sides and the main shrine building a bit further up a rise on the fourth side....

Before heading up the stairs to the main shrine, you come across the water basin for ritual purification...

The fence/walls separating the main building from the rest of the compound were interesting, made of wood framing supported by angled stone buttresses, and topped with what must have been a very heavy tile roof....

I had the impression that stone was not known for its sheer strength, and I'd worry that these relatively-thin columns would snap off in a sharp earthquake, rather than support the wall as they seem designed to do. I dunno.

The wall's roof tiles were held secure by wire...

Update: Fr. Graham McDonnell (seen here), who has been a priest in Kyoto for 50-something years, tells me that this is called a kamon-iri onigawara (家紋入り鬼瓦), which I figure literally means “gargoyle with a family crest”. Frankly, this doesn't do anything to help me figure out what to call it in English, but it's good to know the proper term in Japanese.

As is common with many local shrines, the shrine building itself was quite small, perhaps just one small room, though we couldn't tell for sure because it was closed up when we visited (but that didn't thwart an extremely active population of bees coming and going in great numbers. The inside was probably filled with honey.)

Also common with local shrines, the shrine building itself was protected under an enclosing roof. In the shot below, Paul Barr stands under the roof of the shrine, while just behind him the support for the protective structure rises up and out of frame...

The protective structure itself was in questionable shape...

I suspect that local shrines have these protective structures because they're cheaper than replacing the heavily-shingled roof. A rich and famous shrine can afford to replace the roofs from time to time (such as this one), but I suspect it's much more a challenge for a small local place.

But that's just a guess. I'm not sure what to make of this shrine's roof... it looks like it's had some recent repairs...

But one area seemed at the same time both new and old without any particular divide...

... while just a bit further up the roof it looked very old...

One of the other buildings in the compound had an old lock on the door...

It looks quite old, but they're still for sale, so maybe it's just well weathered.

By the way, since I've answered the one What am I? quiz above, I may as well answer another: the “One Last Towel-Museum What-am-I? Quiz” from two weeks ago is the view looking down through a stack of wire shopping baskets, exactly as the first commenter guessed...

Posts from the Uji trip are continued here...

The trip the other day that produced “Exquisite Beauty Growing Like a Weed by the Side of the Road” was a lazy no-plan drive through some sparsely-populated mountains south-east of Kyoto, in Uji City (famous as the setting for The Tale of Genji, so I hear). Driving on the edge of a small valley, the views of the rice paddies were stereotypical small-village Japan...

This was the first outing of my little lens with a proper monopod. It's the same monopod body I've had for years, but I got rid of the piece-of-crap Manfrotto #3232 head, replacing it with the Really Right Stuff MH-01 Hi-Capacity Monopod Head that, despite the Kool-Kidz “Hi” instead of “High”, is a solid, well-made head that far outclasses the Manfrotto head it replaced.

Here's another of the Roadside Beauty shots, almost identical to one I posted the other day, but the plane of focus in this one is just a smidgen further back such that almost nothing appears to be in focus, giving it a completely different vibe when viewed full screen...

They were photographing what looks to be a man planting rice by hand...

About from that same spot, but looking a bit to the right, was a nice path...

... and turning further brings us to the entrance of a small local shrine, Kiyotakiguu (清瀧宮), which I'll post more about another time...

The grass near the base of the gate was almost glowing green in its light ethereal airiness...

Other nearby scenes included stacked wood and an old thatched storage shed...

Continued here...

I had the most pleasant hospital experience today. (That's not something you hear often!)

For the last 15 years of so I've had occasional bouts of atrial fibrillation (a not-particularly-dangerous arrhythmia, or “irregular heartbeat”), where my heart suddenly can't keep a steady rhythm. In older folks it's often accompanied by tachycardia (“super-fast heartbeat”) which is bad, but I've never had that problem, so my A-fib is not directly dangerous. However, if left untreated for more than a day or two, the irregular flow of blood through the heart could allow clots to form, which are directly dangerous, so when it starts (and no one knows what sets it off), I take an aspirin to thin the blood, and look to correcting it.

When I lived in The States, “correcting it” involved being put under with a general anesthesia, having electrodes attached to my chest with ridiculously-strong adhesive pads, then receiving two well manicured electrical shocks in quick succession, one to stop the heart and another to restart it, hopefully with a good rhythm.

The worst part of this experience was the removal of the electrode pads, because they would take a few layers of skin with them, so I got into the habit of asking that they be removed while I was still under.

Anyway, the first time this happened after moving to Japan, it was late on a weekend, so they did the shock thing in the ER, but later the cardiologist suggested I try the drug “Sunrythm” (サンリズム, pilsicainide hydrochloride) the next time it happened. “Rhythm” in the name, of course, comes from the regular heartbeat it tries to restore, with “Sun” coming from the company that developed it, “Suntory”, which tends to be more famous for its beer and whiskey production.

It worked well every time since, until today when it didn't correct the problem that started yesterday morning, so I went to the Kyoto Prefectural Teaching Hospital here in town, expecting the many-hours wait that always accompanies a visit to a clinic or hospital. I got there at 8:50am and was talking to a doctor by 10:00. Wow, that was fast (made faster by Bill Bryson's At Home on my iPad's Kindle app, courtesy of a gift from my mom).

An hour later I'd had an EKG done and was chatting with a cardiologist. He suggested that they should do the shock thing, since it had been more than a day since the arrhythmia had started. That was fine with me, but I suggested that we try the Sunrythm again, since it turns out that the stuff I'd been taking had long expired, so maybe a quick shot of the good stuff would do the trick.

So, half an hour later (11:30) I was on a bed, still reading my Kindle, with an IV drip of Sunrythm, being attended by an incredibly cute cardiologist whose attractiveness did nothing to help steady my heart. We waited a while to let the Sunrythm work, but it didn't, so at 1:04 she gave me an injection of 1% Propofol, a short-term general anesthesia to put me under.

At least it was supposed to.

She said that it would be painful around the arm where it went in, but it wasn't. Rather, I felt it first in my chest as an odd (but not unpleasant) sensation, then I noticed my vision start to blur. I was giving them (the cute cardiologist had been joined by another cardiologist and two nurses) a running commentary of the effects, but after the vision started to blur, the progression stopped and I remained in a somewhat-blurry-vision not-unpleasant limbo. After a short while I commented to the nurse that it had stopped progressing at blurry vision, and then a minute or so later I noticed that the heart monitor's beeping had become regular, so it seems that the Sunrythm did kick in, just in the nick of time. The whole shock thing wouldn't be needed.

I pointed out the steady rhythm to the nurse, who then commented “yeah, because we shocked you”.

Doh! I had one continuous three-minute memory of what turned out to be a 20-minute span.

I asked whether I'd said anything while I was under, and apparently I said “Ouch” once (probably when they were taking the shock pads off my chest). It turns out that I said it in Japanese, which both surprises and delights me.

Anyway, half an hour later I was waiting in line to pay the bill. With the socialist insurance over here, the bill was 19,140 yen, about US $240.

I had expected a long day of waiting and inaction, but things moved along quickly, the doc was cute, and oh yeah, I didn't die. All and all, a good experience.