I visited the Kyoto Imperial Palace for the first time yesterday, and these three young college students also enjoying the sites were kind enough to pose for a wigglegram for me. The frame above is the last in the series, after they broke out in a smile at the rapid-fire sound of my camera capturing frames at the zippy pace of 10 per second.

昨日京都御所でこの大学生の美人達はポーズしてくれて、僕はウイグルグラムを作りました。以下の写真の上にマウスをあっちこっちしてね！

Here's the wigglegram:

Kimono are almost always photogenic, which is why they tend to appear in my wigglegrams, such as this one and this one.

Because the individual frames are taken manually (as I sweep myself and the camera from one side to the other while the camera fires a burst of 10 to 20 frames), they're all jumbled and misaligned, so before a wigglegram can be made I must somehow line them all up. This is a royal pain to try to do manually in Lightroom, so for a while I had a system where I used some features of the Hugin photo stitcher that sometimes worked like magic, but more often gave unusable Salvador-Dali like results.

So I finally bit the bullet and dusted off my trigonometry and built a Lightroom plugin that allows me to straight and crop the group automatically. The concept was simple, I thought, but it turns out that converting natural thoughts of alignment and rotation do not map at all to how Lightroom does it internally, and wrapping my brain around it enough to bridge the gap was one of the hardest, most frustrating things I've attempted in a very long time. Frankly, my brain is just not cut out for math. (This, despite my undergraduate degree officially being in math.)

Anyway, the upshot is that now there's much less friction for me to make wigglegrams, so I plan to post more of them.

Continued here (with another wigglegram, no less)...

For some reason, Japanese washing machines build up a sludge of some kind, out of sight, on the underside of the drum, and at some point it builds up enough that it starts randomly leaving small deposits on your clothes like speckles of mud. This sort of defeats the purpose of washing them.

洗濯機の汚れはなかなか掃除やりにくいですが、この商品で簡単にピカピカになりました。400円だけで、かなり良いバリューです。

It's particularly maddening because the washer we have has special cleaning features meant to avoid this, but they apparently do not work.

I thought that I could take the thing apart myself to clean it, but it turns out that to get the drum out you need a special tool not available to the general public (a “hammerless flange nut turner”), so at one point I had to have a service come in and clean it ($200!).

Six months later the speckles were back, and not wanting to make a habit of paying $400/year in maintenance on the washer, I gave the $4 cleaner shown at right a try. It worked fantastically.

You fill the washer with hot water, pour this stuff in and agitate for a few minutes, then let it sit overnight. All the sludge ends up floating in the water and it's really gross... but after draining and running a couple of non-load loads, our speckles are gone. At least for now.

If you live in Japan with a Japanese washer, this stuff is recommended.

Picking up from yesterday's “Rediscovering Kyoto’s Chion’in Temple via a Short Mountain Hike”, where I had descended on a mountain trail into a back area of the Chion'in Temple that I hadn't known existed. Yesterday's post ended with me getting to the main area I'd always known about...

I'd seen this area briefly last year, at the end of the roof-repair visit, when it was lit up for an evening lightup event. Here's a photo from Nov 2, 2013:

(A similar shot appeared late last year as decoration on a post about Garmin's horrible products.)

At that time the area was closed off so I couldn't investigate further, but yesterday I was free to stroll around. The view from on top of the bridge, looking lengthwise down it, shows one of the bazillion little outlying structures that are common at temples...

Looking the other way, you currently see only the big shell structure protecting the main building while it undergoes a decade of restoration.

What I didn't realize before is that there's a whole other area tucked behind the main temple building, up a long flight of step:

As high as the nice view suggests we are, we're only at the height of the shell-building roof:

This area had a couple of extra temple areas, including the main entrance to the “No Passage” temple seen in yesterday's post. I saw Japanese tourists heading in, so I suspect I was right that the sign meant “don't use as a shortcut path” and not “no entrance”.

But my attention was brought to a little door leading to the mountain that had another “closed 4pm - 6am” sign on it, and since it was 3:55, I decided to avail myself of the five minutes to see what was beyond the door.

I'll have to revisit this entire area when I have more time and more-appropriate lenses. It's really quite tastefully done, but the nasty orange traffic cone pretty much destroys the scene, another example of the aesthetic discord I find so often in Japan.

More steps, though increasingly rough and natural, lead to a spidery areas of little grave areas tucked here and there. One of the larger areas:

Descending to the more refined temple area, I could enjoy (as much as the lack of time allowed) uncommon from-above perspectives.

The whole temple would close soon, so I retraced my steps back toward the main area, and was about to descend down to and through the temple's huge main gate when I decided to see what was tucked around the other unexplored side of the protective-shell building.

What I found was that the temple has a whole complex of buildings and gardens — the normal attraction of temples for tourists like me — that I hadn't even known about. Lacking time, lenses, and reasonable attire (I was dressed for mountain hiking, like this), I saved them for another day, but continued away from the main area to find that there was another gate...

As evidence of how surprising this was to me, let me note that I lived for a year with my living room 150 meters from here... 20 seconds if you run quickly. I had no idea.

To be fair, this gate is not visible from the road, and, I think, not normally accessible except from the inside for use as an exit.

To reach the road, I first had to go down a windy series of steps...

... through a small passage under a building, until you finally come out at pavement...

Except, that's not the road, that's part of the driveway to the temple's back administrative offices.

This view I recognized, having gone by hundreds of times. It's right next to the Shoren'in Temple, and about 85 yards from the entrance to where I used to live.

For the last decade I've lived much farther away — almost half a mile — so I guess that's my excuse for not having more than the most superficial understanding of the Chion'in Temple. It was such a delight yesterday to discover not only so much more, but to also realize that perhaps the best parts are still waiting to be discovered.

Heading back during the fall foliage season, perhaps in three weeks, is high on the agenda.

It's been a month since I sprained my ankle while on a mountain hike. It's been feeling mostly better for a while, so I finally decided to do a short hike up to the Shogunzuka overlook just to test things out.

The hike is very simple (I've done it with a five-year-old in tow), and from home it took only 10 minutes to the trailhead, and from there 20 minutes up.

It was a splendid day, but the view from the top was hazy and dull...

The plane in the distance is Jetstar 615, half way on its run from Tokyo to Kumamoto. Flying at an altitude of 11km, it's about 34km (21 miles) away at this point.

There wasn't much else to see, so I turned around to try my luck going back down, a direction that I tend to be injury proned.

A minute into the downhill portion I came across trail signposts, and on a whim decided to take the trail down to the Chion'in Temple, a path I'd never taken.

These local signposts are much nicer than the official Kyoto City posts like the one in the lower right of the photo (like this), which indicates that the path to Chion'in doesn't even go there (or anywhere).

The sign above informs me that the trail's exit at the Chion'in Temple closes at 4pm. I had plenty of time.

Despite that I used to live about a minute's walk away from the Chion'in Temple, I've never had much interest in it, other than its famous huge wooden gate. When you walk through the gate and up the bazillion steps to the temple proper, you're greeted mostly with a vast expanse of dusty gravel and a common (but big) temple building. Not too interesting.

The temple building is currently undergoing its once-in-a-hundred-years roof repair, which made for a great photo opportunity for the three days it was open, but for the other years of the project, you get just a big ugly protection shell.

So anyway, I was curious where among this stuff the trail came out of the mountain, and with that in mind, I was a bit surprised to find the trail exit the mountain near a dilapidated and apparently-abandoned temple(ish) building I'd not known of...

There was also a mini Stonehenge of monuments, including these two massive rocks:

The carving on the one with the flowing writing is amazing...

Just off trail, spiders had set up their own monuments, with webs that reflected (refracted?) pretty colors...

Then I came across an entrance to what I assume is a sub-temple of some sort, and a graveyard:

Normally if they don't want you to go in, the sign says “Entrance Prohibited”, but this sign says “Passage Prohibited”. I took that to mean that they didn't want you using it as a shortcut path to some destination beyond, which meant that I probably could have gone in, but I didn't want to take the chance that I misunderstood, so I didn't enter. After all, I'm just a guest.

Finally I came to the gate that closes at 4pm...

And then was stunned to see the biggest bell I'd ever seen:

I was now regretting that the one lens that I brought with me (the Sigma “Bigma” 50-500mm) didn't go nearly wide enough to do this bell justice. According to the sign in the photo that leads this post, it was built in 1636 (378 years ago). It's 3.3m (~11 ft) tall, 2.8m wide at the mouth, 30cm (about a foot) thick, and about 70 metric tons (150,000 pounds).

Just wow.

The bell is a designated “Important Cultural Property of Japan”, which somehow made it more funny when a newspaper delivery guy came whizzing by on his scooter, up the steps I had just descended, and through the gate that was soon to be locked at 4pm...

He came back soon enough, so he probably didn't go up the mountain :-), but instead to the sub-temple area I'd been hesitant to enter.

From the bell area, a short path went down to the aforementioned “vast expanse of dusty gravel” main area, so by now I knew where I was, but I felt silly for not having known about the bell or the sub-temple(ish) area. (I didn't realize at the time that this was merely the start of many feeling-silly-that-I-was-so-ignorant experiences for the day.)

Rather than go down to the main area, I took another path that lead, as best I can tell, off the temple property to a very small little park that was predominantly filled with big ugly “STAY OFF THE GRASS” signs, and this little gazebo with an even uglier “CAMPING STRICTLY PROHIBITED” sign sitting squarely in the one place in the park that anyone might want to actually enjoy...

This kind of discord (a pleasant/beautiful scene is totally marred by something ugly that really doesn't need to be there) is common in Japan. It's such a shame because the Japanese sense for beauty and harmony with nature is otherwise so nice.

In their defense, though, though the ugly sign does destroy the one nice area of the park someone might want to enjoy, it's also the one area someone might want to camp in, so yeah, they have that going for them. /-:

Anyway, facing the park more or less next to the big bell area was another temple I'd not known existed:

I strolled around the area a bit and finally came across a place I'd been before, a nice set of steps set in a mossy hillside, just off a small road. I'd seen it just once, 2½ years ago, but recognized it instantly.

So with that point of reference in place, I returned to the big bell at the Chion'in Temple, and headed down to the “vast expanse of dusty gravel”... only to be surprised yet again by how much I hadn't realized existed.

Continued here...

Still revisiting autumns past while we wait for the fall-foliage season to start here in Kyoto, here are some genial little men at the Sekisanzen-in Temple in north-east Kyoto.

I'm not sure what they're for, but I suspect they represent votive donations, such as these statuettes at the Sanzen-in Temple.

I stopped by with Damien prior to my first visit to Kyoto’s Shugakuin Imperial Villa two years ago, because we had a few extra minutes and it's nearby.

The affable men were in front of a little sub building on the temple grounds...

Though this was a short visit, photos from it have appeared incidentally on my blog before. One was in “A Long But Photogenic November in Kyoto”:

Another was in “A Post For Damien Douxchamps’ Parents in Belgium”:

They had a nice stone lantern in the garden, but I couldn't do much with it:

It reminds me of the one at the Enkouji Temple, which I think has come across nicely on my blog here, here, here, and here.

But I'm always a sucker for moss and colorful leaves...

Back at the cheerful little men, I noticed some stickers placed around the frame:

My initial thought was that they looked like geisha name stickers, like these, but that makes no sense at a temple like this, and then I recalled having seen name stickers of pilgrims at a temple before, out in the middle of nowhere, here. So yeah, they're probably names of pilgrims.