The family down the hall has had a nice flower display on their porch for the last week or so, but now that it's gone, I thought I'd recreate some of it here....

Outside the gates of the forsaken and forlorn dorm of my previous post, I noticed this stand of housing magazines, and couldn't help but appreciate the wit of its title, nor its inescapable appropriateness for the location. The magazine's name in Japanese is オウチ, which is a polite way to say “home.” It's a three-syllable word (oh, eww, chi), but when romanize (written with roman letters, like English) it becomes Ouchi, which looks just like “Ouch!” except for the location of the dot at the end (! vs. i). Very witty.

Considering the common penniless student looking for a place to live, especially in today's market, the English meaning of “Ouch” seems more than appropriate. Kumano dorm is apparently fairly inexpensive, but one visit shows that there are clearly more ways to feel the housing “ouch” than financially.

As I wrote in January, one of the most forsaken places I've ever seen is Kyoto University's Kumano Dorm (京都大学の熊野寮). It's right here in the city, but once you enter the grounds, it feels as if you're visiting the long-abandoned remains of a war-ravaged society. Wandering the grounds, only the word “forsaken” seems to do justice to the ambiance. It's otherworldly eerie.

Since my visit last fall when I took these pictures, I've learned a bit about why it is the way it is from my friend Shimada-san. During the student unrest common around the world in the late 60s and early 70s, radical leftist students took over the dorm, requiring the government to reclaim it by force. As part of the resolution, it was decided that the students would administer all aspects of the dorm's existence, receiving from the university only minimal financial support.

Without adult supervision, you really can't expect a bunch of college kids to administer a hot-dog stand for a long weekend, much less expect revolving generations of kids to administer a complex of buildings for 35+ years. I'm sure that over the years there have been students who felt a mature sense of responsibility for themselves and their actions, but for the most part it seems that if a resident broke something (accidentally or purposefully), there were no repercussions, and no authority to come along and fix it. Forsaken.

According to this history of the dorm, it seems that one of the first decisions the students made was to admit women. I must admit that I would have done the same. 🙂

From the road, the place has the drab and depressing look of a prison, a look common to educational institutions in Japan (particularly high schools). From the entrance, aside from a huge pile of abandoned appliances stacked up against the edge of one building (left side in the picture above), there's little to indicate the despair that awaits within. In fact, the large number of bicycles neatly parked in the large front area hints at the bustle of life inside.

You don't have to wander far before things start looking down.

Beside the abandoned car is a massive tangled pile of abandoned bicycles. It's well covered with weeds, but being right against the front fence, is visible from the street.

The big pile of abandoned bicycles is actually an indication of the more mature nature of the students, having taken the trouble to discard them in one place. Not all have been so heavily burdened by a sense of community, discarding their vehicles randomly around the grounds....

The stickers on the scooters' licence plates indicate that their compulsory insurance had been prepaid through 1994 and 1995. (Frankly, they look in remarkably good shape for not having been street legal for at least the last 12 years.)

The vegetation had been cleared from one area to make way for a large skateboarding ramp, with the furniture in the photo above being where the spectators would sit.

The photo above shows the far end of a long, thin dorm building, the same one mentioned earlier as being visible from the entrance with the stacks of abandoned appliances. At the bottom of the stairs, behind a tall and thick wall of junk, is the first-floor exit.

All the buildings seemed to be designed the same way, with the hallway servicing the dorm rooms being technically inside the building, but with huge windows (may broken) so that it feels as if the hallway is half outside.

The picture above looks through one such window, across the hallway to the brownish door of a student's room. Looking at the larger version (click on the image), you can see that there are various things scrawled on the door and its window. The big red text, which likely dates back to the 70s, warns that members of a rival communist group must keep out. (Although the students were united against the authorities during the unrest, rival factions often fought against each other as well.)

On the door's window, it looks to the pledge of some guy named Tanimoto to give up alcohol (dated Sep 30, 1988).

Looking in the hallway window, down the hall, reveals more gloom and an impressive collection of large beer bottles.

Having been built in 1965, the rooms are apparently quite spacious by today's standards, but still lacking space, students store their things in the hallway, and in the case below, in the stairwell. (A fire marshall seeing this would probably spontaneously implode.)

Behind the rear-most building is a “lawn” of sorts, closer to a jungle. Looking at the large version of the picture above, you can see a bazillion gossamer wires draping from the roof, placed there as students placed their own antenna on the roof and wired it to their room.

The dorm got hot water in the communal showers only in 1991, and apparently it broke down quickly thereafter, so something like a TV antenna must be a luxury.

Between two of the buildings is an elegant water feature and courtyard....

I didn't see a single person the whole time I was there. As I said, it was eerie, to say the least. Most of the time I was somewhat on edge, half expecting that at any moment a pack of disfigured, marauding, wild dogs would come flying around the corner to eat my face.

Twice while I was there, the ghostly silence was rudely interrupted by announcements over a hidden (but very loud) public-address system, an elderly man's voice calling such-and-such a person for a phone call. Apparently, the rooms have no phones, but there's a phone (and an old man) somewhere.

Shimada-san found a site with some pictures from 2002 of the dorm. It's all in Japanese, but just click on the list of links at the bottom and you'll see some small but interesting pictures. In particular, page 6 shows an amazing pile of dust with a slight layer of telephone underneath.

Recently I've noticed what appears from the outside to be a substantially worse version of this dorm, Kyoto University's Yoshida Dorm. It's apparently much older (dating back perhaps 100 years, to the Meiji Era), but unlike this dorm I often see signs of life as I drive by. It's on my list to visit.

One lovely side-effect of using Adobe Lightroom as the hub of my image workflow is that I now have all the shots I've loaded into it available at my fingertips (which at this point is everything since last summer, currently about 12,500 images that have survived the delete key).

I came across the wonderful photo set from when Nils and I visited some temples last fall, and realized that I hadn't posted many of them. At the time, I did post a bunch of fall-foliage desktops, and a few about our visit to Konpukuji Temple, as well as one post with a plant picture with interesting bokeh and another of someone relaxing at a temple. But there are so many more that appeal to me, a few of which I've included here.

For some reason, the picture above really appeals to me. It's similar to the last photo used in my first post about Lightroom, but with a lot of people. I don't know why, but having caught the lady turning to look at me seems to add a lot to this image. At least, for me it does.

The following image, too, is wholly unremarkable, but I like it and it's my blog, so here it is. The area in front of the house was really barren as if they had finished construction but not yet started landscaping, and I thought the one little flower seemed to complement that well.

That's Mt. Furano and a host of other peaks, 15 miles in the distance. The view from our 8^th-floor hotel room on our trip to Hokkaido was wonderful. We stayed at the New Furano Prince Hotel, which is not to be confused with the non-new one some distance away.

As I mentioned in a post the other day, I love how low-angle shots like these really compress distance, especially all the tracts of farmland in the foreground.

As for the hills, the near edge of the hills in the shot above are 4 miles away, but the dark square patch of trees in the upper-left is 11 miles away. (There's quite a bit of farming in between the two, hidden behind the hills).

In the lower-right of the first shot above, you can see a path heading away from the hotel. That's the path in the shot above, looking back on the hotel.

It's also the path that heads a short distance to the “Mori no Tokei” coffee house (森の時計 — Timepiece of the Woods), a cafe made famous by it being the main setting for the recent Japanese drama “Yasashii Jikan” (優しい時間— Tender Time). I watched the first episode just prior to this trip, and it looked interesting. Its cinematography was just wonderful. (This area, Furano City, is apparently stunningly beautiful about 50 weeks out of the year, the week we were there not being one of them.)

The cafe was nice, and not horribly expensive (a cup of coffee was 600 yen / $5), but they didn't have milk on the menu. The waitress actually tried to say no when I asked whether Anthony could have the milk we'd brought along, until I gave her a “are you some kind of a monster?” look, and after checking with the manager, she relented. Really stupid. Otherwise, the cafe was nice, and the coffee was good.

We had lunch at the Furano Wine House, which is way up on a hill and offers wonderful, panoramic views. It's 50 meters higher than the immediate surrounding area, but when you're up there it feels much higher. Here's the view toward our hotel, which is a spec on the horizon about a third of the way in from the left....

The hilltop with the wine house also has a tiny but nice little park. We ended up having lunch there two days in a row, it was so nice.

In the zoom below, the hotel is just to the right of Fumie's head, two and a half miles distant. You can't see them from this angle, but there are still-active ski runs that end right at the hotel.

The mountain behind the hotel looks quite impressive in this shot, but it's another case of the low angle compressing distance. That peak is several miles away, and I don't recall that we even noticed it while at the hotel. (The mountains directly behind the hotel are much shorter, although as I noted, they do sport some of the only ski runs in the area.) Perhaps it was just that our view from the window, the other direction across the valley to the taller mountains, held our attention.

The mountain in the view above is “Mt. Furano West” (富良野西岳 — furanonishidake), and at only 1,331 meters, is almost a kilometer shorter than those across the valley.

For completeness, here's the reverse angle of the hill with the wine house, from our hotel window. The park and the wine house are at the top of the hill with the barren triangle shape, just right of center.

The hotel itself was nice, and the few times we called down for something someone arrived seemingly before we even pulled our hand away from the phone. My one gripe is that they didn't have room service. I generally consider room service to be a huge extravagance, but it can sure be a blessing when returning after a long day, when Anthony is tired and fussy, and Mommy and Daddy are, well, tired and fussy.

Rather than room service, the lobby had a convenience store, and each room had an empty fridge. Our lunches on this trip were great, but dinners mostly consisted of convenience-store junk. Still, it was a thousand times better than the last hotel I wrote about.