Picking up from yesterday's “Gargoyle-Tile Workshop Visit Part 1: Factory Tour”, we'll look a bit on how these complex decorative tiles are made.

These are essentially pottery, so crafting is “simple”: create the shape you want out of clay, let it air dry for a few months, then fire it in a kiln for 30 hours at a bazillion degrees.

It's not that simple, of course. First off, with the lead time to the final firing measured in months, they can't afford to have pieces crack in the kiln, so they've developed crafting and firing techniques that completely avoids cracks. I didn't realize how extraordinary this was until someone else on the tour who happened to be a potter exclaimed her shock. Apparently some loss during firing is always expected.

Another complication is that the clay shrinks about 13% when fired, so they have to take that into account when building a replacement piece whose final size must exactly match the original. They deal with this 13% shrinkage (building everything 13% larger) day in and day out, so after a lifetime it must all be second nature.

It's perhaps difficult to tell in the photo above, but the fang in the near-side edge of the mouth is missing in the version being crafted. As part of the tour, Mr. Minobe showed a bit how he models the clay, and in doing so added that fang...

This is probably the most difficult part, especially for someone like me without an artistic bone in my body. He's got to get the general shape, 13% larger than the final desired size.

To create a good bond, he places rough groves in the clay using the fork-like tool that was the subject of my recent “What am I?” quiz. A lot of people guessed the fork-like tool had something to do with clay, but no one had the proper answer that it's for scoring a surface to be attached to another surface.

Another bad photo, sorry, but if you look carefully you can see the fang has been attached. He's then using another tool to smooth part of the brow.

Of course, this is just the roughing in of the basic shape. I'm sure there's quite a bit of work and artistry to get the final sculpture ready for the kiln, 13% larger than the actual target size.

Here's a closeup of yesterday's “Massive Tile Awaiting the Kiln”...

At one point while allowed some free time to wander around the workshop, I noticed the current head of the household, Kei-ich Minobe, working on a project. As it happens, he was about to attach a strip of clay to a work in progress, so he was just starting to score the clay with the aforementioned fork-like tool...

He was the subject of episode #57 in the NHK TV “Professional” series, in 2007. I've found it on the web here.

美濃邉さんはNHKの番組「プロフェッショナル 仕事の流儀」で出演しました。「鬼師 美濃邉惠一」。

As I mentioned in the previous post, my visit to the workshop was as a guinea pig during a test run of Tour du Lac Biwa's “Special Japanese Gargoyle Workshop and Hot Spring Tour”. I also got to do the other parts of the tour (all for free!), except we had to cut the hot-spring visit short because a typhoon was coming in and we worried that the train line would shut down, and I had to be home for a late-afternoon appointment that I couldn't take a chance on missing.

I've much else to post from this tour, and from other tours I got to take part in. Sadly, a lingering cold this week caused me to miss a tour that involved zip-lining and kayaking. Maybe next time!

Japanese temples generally have tiled roofs, with ornamental tiles of various sizes and meanings sprinkled liberally throughout. For example, the demon-face tile seen the other day on this post:

In Japanese these ornamental tiles are called onigawara (鬼 瓦) — literally “demon tile” — though the word is used for any complex decorative tile, with or without a demon. The English word “gargoyle” is often used for these; it's not really the right word, but it's evocative of the same concept, and I can't think of anything better.

Earlier in the summer I had a fantastic opportunity (more on that later) to get a private tour of the Minobe family workshop, which has been entrusted to make these tiles for generations. Subject over the years to weather, earthquakes, war, and vandalism, the tiles end up lasting only a few hundred years, so much of their current work is recreating and replacing the ornamental tiles that earlier generations of the family had created for famous Kyoto temples.

The huge decorative tiles seen above are still called onigawara (demon tiles), even though they don't have demons or ogres or devils, or anything else like that. Here's the detail from the one on the right, of what looks to me like a phoenix...

Side note; “Ebisu” is the namesake for one of Japan's oldest beers, archaically transliterated on the label as “Yebisu” but pronounced the same. To facilitate distribution of this beer, the company made a train station near the brewery in 1901 and named it after the beer. The Ebisu neighborhood of Tokyo then grew up around it. So the station and the neighborhood are named after a beer, but the beer is named after an ancient deity.

In front of the kirin is a title with a simple flower. There were also things like birds and fish, and all had meanings. I might be remembering this incorrectly, but having a bird on your roof (or in your garden) would mean people would flock there in larger numbers, and having a fish means that people would return time and again. The point is that there's meaning to all of this that goes back centuries; it's not just decoration.

This workshop is not normally open to the public, but can now be visited as part of an exclusive tour by Tour du Lac Biwa (“Lake Biwa Tours”), a new company devoted to English-language off-the-beaten-path tours in Shiga, near Kyoto.

Prior to them opening their tour business to the public, I attended a test tour for free, as a guinea pig. I had a great time, and contributed my photos to their cause, so you'll see some of my photos (and photos of me) on the tour page.

(I've taken a number of their tours as a test guinea pig, but couldn't write about it on my blog until they started business officially. Now that they have, I can start to write about some of the wonderful experiences I had.)

The huge demon tile above is the one that I whimsically labeled as the “Japanese Gargoyle of Email Destruction” in my post about lost email the other day:

It's interesting to compare the eyes on this one to some of the others. With most of these demon-face tiles, the eyes are bulged out like the huge awaiting-the-kiln unit above, or like that with deep indentations for the pupils. But with this one right above, the eyes are empty tubes all the way in, which means that they'll turn into deep holes of black once mounted. (In the photo above, what looks like pupils are really holes in the mounting bracket at the back of the tile, which would normally not be lit when actually mounted. The lining up to appear as pupils in this photo was quite intentional.)

Mr. Minobe gave a demonstration of how they work, which will become part two of this writeup.

Continued here...

I came across these fork-like tools on a craftman's workbench, and thought they'd make a good “What am I?” Quiz. What, exactly, are these fork-like tools used for?

クゥイズ：この工具は何のためでしょうか？

For the first time in ages, this evening we had a grill-at-your-table dinner at Yakiniku Nanzan (Hieidaira location).

I didn't have my camera with me, so I'm putting some photos from 2007 (seven years ago!) that I found in my image library.

We go in fits and spurts, but I think this might be the first time this year. It didn't disappoint.

I always order karubi (marinated short-rib beef), and today had six portions, which are described as for a single person but they're pretty small. It wasn't quite the gluttons affair of the now-closed all-you-can-eat beer/BBQ buffet that I wrote about in years past, and since I was driving there's no beer, but we ate well.

I took these photos almost a year before my first post on polarization filters, so perhaps I didn't really know about them yet. Now, one glance at the photo above and I know it would have benefited greatly from one.

The meat shown in these photos is gyutan, a name I prefer to the English. It's okay, but I much prefer kalbi.

If you find yourself in Kyoto or Otsu and can get up to Hieidaira, Nanzan is highly recommended.

I'm finally getting around to photos from last November, when old Yahoo co-worker Sergey Kolychev paid me a visit. (He's not old, our co-worker status is).

In the intervening three years since his prior visit he'd become fluent in Japanese to the point that he can read novels, which just blows my mind. Japanese is at least his fourth language (after Ukrainian, Russian, and English), so maybe they get easier as they stack up.

We packed quite a bit into one day. We started out with a visit to the Heian Shrine...

We then popped over to the Nanzen Temple...

We somehow found a little hiking trail back beyond the Eikando Temple, which provided a nice view of the city through the trees...

People often put up little wooden plaques as a memorial of their hiking trip, such as the bigger board above placed by a group of 13 people ranging from 79 years old down to five months old. I wouldn't have paid the crow a second thought, but Sergey noticed that it was a three-legged crow, which is apparently a thing. You learn something new every day.

When then moved north to the Hounen-in Temple (法然院), which has appeared on my blog of late here, here, and here.

The thin depth of field in this next shot makes it looks a bit unreal...

This next shot, of Sergey standing under the gate, looks a bit unreal because I made a mistake and severely underexposed it, so had to employ HDR-like post processing to recover a usable image...

I sort of tried to replicate this old point-n-shoot shot that has for some reason always stuck in my mind...

We moved north to the Silver Pavilion and its famous sand sculptures, which I posted about the other day. Here's one more shot of the lush moss there...

Growing boys must be nourished, so we repaired over to a tea cafe for choux à la crème...

I opted for coffee, but Sergey is a connoisseur of fine tea, as Fumie can be sometimes, so I've been to this shop many times.

Sergey mentioned some knee pain that had been bothering him for a long time, so I brought him to the best masseur in Kyoto, Kentaro Kataoka. Sergey had never had a real massage before, so it was quite an experience.

I've had many massages in America, but after having had massages in Japan, I'd never classify what I had in America as a real massage. They're more like “shove some skin around a bit and hope it relaxes you” sessions. These in Japan are closer to physical therapy. In a blog post about Japanese massage a couple of years ago, I described this masseur's technique as “a ferocious pinpoint attack like his fingertips are tactical weapons trying to massage the muscle from the inside out”. It can be very effective, but painful at the time.

(I describe my hit-n-miss experiences with acupuncture here.)

Sergey thought the whole experience was great, so I'm glad that Kataoka-sensei was able to work us in at short notice. He'd been out for his daily jog when I called, and kindly cut it short just for us.

This was at a temporary location at the time, but since then he's opened a permanent shop near Teramachi Nijo. Highly recommend.

Anyway, newly refreshed, we popped over to the Chion'in Temple (知恩院) to see its big main gate...

A shot from this visit appeared in a post half a year ago, on “Huge Main Gate of Kyoto’s Chion’in Temple”.

We then moved to the famous Kiyomizu Temple (清水寺)....

The late-afternoon light was rich.

This World Heritage Site temple is perhaps most well known for its big balcony...

Better shots of it, from years past, appear here, and here, and here.

But it's best of all with a friendly face...