This post continues from “New Views of Kyoto from Shogunzuka’s New Observation Deck”, about some big construction at Shougunzuka (将軍家) on a mountain overlooking eastern Kyoto that finally completed last fall. This post looks at the “new” temple building.

In that previous post I showed this photo of the new temple building from the outside:

This looks a bit odd for a temple building, and from the back you can see that it has what appears to be distinctly-new and distinctly-old sections:

Above the entrance is a richly engraved/painted sign showing the name of the place. It's rare for me to see one new with all its splendid colors... normally they haven't been painted in 100 years, and any paint fragments that might remain are well faded. With that being the norm, this new one was almost grotesque in its vibrance:

Even the little cushion-pillows between the sign and the holders were splendidly new:

The wood was clearly quite old, made to look all the older by the newness of some of the embellishments:

Inside it looked nothing like a normal temple...

I asked about it, and it turns out that it's an old dojo (martial-arts arena, like this). It had been carefully dismantled and brought here piece by piece, then painstakingly reassembled.

The new part of the building seen tacked on in the “From the Back” shot is where they put the altar and all the religious stuff, and in the shot above it's just out of frame to the right, where all the warm incandescent light is spilling into the dojo.

I know enough not to use a camera inside a temple building without asking, so that's the first thing I'd done when I came inside, before even asking about the building's history. I was told that it was fine so long as I don't photograph the altar area, so I didn't. Moments after talking to me, the lady had to go stop a Japanese guy from taking pictures of the altar.

The shape of the building made photography fun...

A continuation from part one and part two of my nighttime stroll during a rare snowstorom in Kyoto on the early morning of January 3rd.

The photo above is much less impressive than the actual view was, with the trees receding at various stages up the mountain in the background in crisp relief to the temporarily-clear sky, it had a particularly three-dimensional feel, with added weight and depth due to the heavily-laden trees.

I wish I would have made it a Wigglegram. When this thought first popped in my mind as I wrote the caption above, it was as a joke, because a wigglegram's frames are usually captured in a burst that lasts but a second or so, and the shot above took 10 seconds just by itself.

But now that I think about it, with nothing moving in the frame but the clouds and stars, I could have spent a few minutes and a bit of care in moving the tripod to capture frames from positions a meter or two apart, and in between. Maybe next time.

(The picture above is so tall and narrow because the wide-angle shot taken up at an angle required quite a bit of perspective correction to make upright things look upright, which if left uncropped leaves wedges of non-image int the lower corners like this, and I didn't want the wedges this time.)

The dark blur in the middle of the street is a young couple of about 20, who had trudged through the snow to visit the Heian Shrine, presumably for their hatsumode, a traditional first visit to a shrine in the new year. They assumed, as I would have assumed, that a shrine as popular as the Heian Shrine would be open continuously during the first few days of the year.

As it happened, during the big snowfall on January 1st, I'd asked a worker at the shrine their hours, thinking that I might show up early the next morning to get some snowy photos of their garden (as I was lucky enough to get seven years ago). It turns out that they keep normal hours, so the site is closed from 9pm until 6am (with the garden opening at about 8:30).

It was about 12:30am when I talked to the young couple, so they had 5½ hours to kill. They did an about face and trudged away.

At least the view that they could see from the street was nice:

The falling snow isn't very visible in the long exposure (two seconds) above, but it's quite evident in this similar shot posted the other day, which was taken with a 1/20th-second exposure.

The snow was very sticky, and readily stuck on improbably-vertical surfaces, such as street-light poles...

Different kinds of trees took the snow differently, with some barely getting any accumulation, but others having every little branch and twig swell fivefold in thickness with snow, such as this row of trees...

The blur at left was an old lady walking. It was the last person I saw for two and a half hours.

The ultra-modern-design cement garage entrance to what I assume is a very, very rich persons house seemed quite at home in the snow.

Yet equally at home just a few paces down the same wall was the warm non-car entrance...

This got me thinking about entryways, and I ended up photographing a bunch of them. (The most tastefully presented was Larry Ellison's, seen here as the lead photo of my first post in this series, so all the ones I post today will be second-tier at best.)

As I mentioned in Part 2, the snow finally let up at about this time and I could use the camera much more freely, without trying to protect it and the lens from sticky snow. The snow came and went for the next three and a half hours that I was out.

When I first arrived at the Nanzen Temple (南禅寺), I set up the camera at the base of the path leading up to the big entrance gate, and though it was quite dark (much darker than it appears in any of these photos), I thought I should have been able to see the murky outline of the gate, but I couldn't.

Then I realized that I had to move 30m over to the next path. Doh!

Going up the path, crossing over and through the gate to where the path continues on the other side, you're greeted with this view of a main temple building with a massive roofed incense pot out front:

This particular little section of path always makes me think of this photo of Anthony when he was 4½. The incense pot can be seen in more detail in this shot from a different post.

It was exceedingly dark where I took this, and I couldn't see much but an outline. A 20-second exposure helps to make things clear. The map tells me that it's an entrance to a “Hojo Tearoom” (南禅寺の方丈).

Not far away was a set of steps and a couple of entrances that were brightly lit, so this exposure is only 1.3 seconds long...

Back to the big gate, here's a side view. By now it's 3:10am...

I've been inside only once, two years ago, but it made an impression. I think I snapped over a thousand photos during the visit, including one of my early wigglegrams, and these photos. It's much quieter at 3:30am.

Back out into civilization, to Sanjo Street, a shot at the base of “The Incline” looking up the hill, which at this point was a field of snow-covered ice....

Continued here...

We're planning a family trip across the US by RV in March, from San Francisco to Cleveland. It's not the kind of thing I've done before (well, not since I was 10), so I'd appreciate any advice anyone might be able to offer.

In particular, I'd want to have phone and internet access while on the road. All the phones we have here in Japan are simlocked 🙁 , so I'd have to probably buy a couple of cheap phones, and perhaps rent a mobile hotspot? Suggestions appreciated...

She could have been commenting on my inability to set up the tripod, aim the camera, and actually focus the shot properly in time, but I think she was talking about the weather.

これは真夜中の大雪中の撮影散歩の続きの記事です。 今朝の零時から５時間の散歩をしました、平安神宮と南禅寺の周辺で。 京都新聞により, 61年ぶりに２０センチを超えました。

At 7am this morning I posted “Kyoto At Night During a Heavy Snow” after having spent the night wandering around my area of Kyoto with a camera and tripod. I suspected that the evening's snowfall had beat the record-breaking snow of the previous day, and indeed now after four hours of sleep I see in the paper that it was the 4th most snow on record for Kyoto city proper, and the most since almost a foot and a half fell one day in January 1954.

Some folks were out and about, but for the most part I had the area to myself.

I like the snow when it's photogenic and I don't have to drive (this event several years ago pretty much scarred my snow-driving confidence), but a quick heavy wet snow has its drawbacks. One problem was keeping snow off the lens (I fumbled with an umbrella while trying to work the camera), and another was that snow or things weighted down by snow could come crashing down any time.

Seconds after taking the shot above, one of the snow-laden big branches to the left came crashing down. The sound as it was ripped from the tree and then crashed through other branches on the way to a huge thud was impressive. (Photographically it was less impressive... a shot 10 seconds later merely shows an empty spot where the branch used to be.)

When I was near the Heian Shrine I would sometimes see folks out for a stroll, or out to take pictures, or just walking home, but once I got onto the back streets, I went two and a half hours without seeing or hearing another soul.

午前一時半位、雪は止んだ。落雪はまだヤバい！

The snow stopped for a while at about 1:30am and I could work with the camera a bit more freely, but I was well aware that huge masses of snow could come down from the branches (or with the branches) onto my head and lens at any time. I was careful and took calculated risks.

Occasionally I'd hear the rending of a branch, or more commonly the huge thump of a big pile of snow hitting the ground. Then in the Nanzen Temple I came across a tree that had quite-recently fallen...

You can tell from the car tracks running right through it that the tree had fallen after most of the snow had fallen, but enough snow had accumulated on it to show that it hadn't just fallen. It was now 3:30am; I'm guessing it fell an hour or two prior.

It fell in about the same location that these kids are standing.

I came back into civilization at about 4am at Sanjo Street, at The Incline. It's an area with a steep hill that was put to use 120 years ago when Japan's first power generator was built, flinging water down the hill in pipes to slam into water turbines. I half expected to find lots of abandoned cars and accidents, but there were just a couple of taxis paused by the side of the road...

I'm not sure which would be more crazy... trying to drive in this with a car, or a bicycle...

Continued here...

三日の零時から５時間、大雪のなかで京都市東山周辺でカメラと三脚と一緒に散歩しました。

At 100,000,000 US dollars for the single-family residence, I suppose it's not a Motel 6, but apparently he'll leave the light on for you nevertheless. 🙂

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is reported to have bought this villa near my house several years ago, for a reported 100 million US dollars, though it's not known whether he's ever actually visited it in person. It's been reported, though, that he's pouring an additional 100 million dollars into renovations.

(Larry's house has appeared on my blog once before, here.)

Anyway, I wasn't outside his front door at 3:40 am just to loiter. I had finished my most recent post about the big New Year's Day snow at 11:40pm, and then immediately went out to photograph another big snow that had started not long before.

I was out until 5am. It snowed heavily for the fist couple of hours... I'd bet that yesterday's 58-year-old Kyoto-snowfall record was easily broken again.

The shot above is one that really illustrates to me my lack of skill with the camera. The branch seen in the shot was very large, and it held a huuuuuuge amount of snow. I was taking a real risk to merely be under it, and quickly took a photo with the intent to illustrate both the amount of snow and the risk. But neither really shows up in the end result. )-:

I suppose it's ice crystals in the upper atmosphere, but I'm not really sure what causes this kind of circular rainbow around the moon. The colors were much more pronounced than you see here, particularly with the blue/indigo/violet areas of the rainbow, which were clearly visible at a glance, but don't seem to show up in this shot.

(I've shown the same affect much better, during a solar eclipse, here and here.)

Continued here...