Slowly making progress from the outing already seen in:

• Entrance Foyer to the Seifuso Villa in Kyoto
• Approaching the Tea House
• Between the Tea House and the Garden

(with photos also appearing here and here).

In the previous post we had finally reached the garden, so now we'll take a short walk through it...

The light was pretty difficult that day, quickly changing from brilliantly harsh to utterly dull. The shot above is from a latter moment, stylized a bit in Lightroom.

(By the way, I've come to the conclusion that when I say “the light was difficult”, I really mean “I'm just not skillful enough”; doing somthing funky in Lightroom afterwards, as above, can often reclaim some value.)

On the other hand, the lead photo is pretty much as it was captured in camera. But successes outside in the sun that day were rare. Here's another “stylized” result from 30 seconds after “Stylized Shade” when the sun was suddenly shining like, er, the sun:

Making our way all the way around the lake, we finally arrive at the main residence, which we haven't seen yet in these posts, except its photogenic entrance foyer. Here we've come upon the outside of what might be comparable to the main residence's livingroom:

Turning around to look back at the garden, you can get a sense for why the garden was placed as it was:

And then actually stepping in and looking out, the exposure for the dark inside makes for a less accurate view of the outside, but it's still a nice shot...

By the way, the long bamboo crosspiece on the floor in the right half of the image is there for the rare occasion when grounds are open to the public, to indicate to visitors approaching from outside that even though the doors may be open to grant an unrestricted view of the inside, entry inside is now allowed.

My visit, on the other hand, thanks to kind arrangements by my host, Will Baber of Kyoto University, was absolutely Full Monty unrestricted.

Continued here...

There's something about the physical size of the Nikkor 300mm f/2 lens (also seen here) that draws smiles and attention wherever it goes. I had it out a couple of years ago for the 2012 Kyoto City Marathon, and with the 2014 race coming up this weekend, I was reminded of a post from 2012 that I've been meaning to write.

Because I've seen many fun reactions to the big lens (such as seen here and here), it didn't surprise me when folks hammed it up a bit for it when I positioned myself at the last turn of the marathon, perhaps 20 seconds from the finish line. People seemed to notice it from quite a distance away, even though I was in a scrum of folks with cameras. It's a big lens.

I was happy people were reacting to the lens, but the number of folks having the energy to do that after having run 26 miles seemed oddly high to me, so it make complete sense when I stepped away from the throng of folks at the turn and noticed that I'd been right beside a big “SMILE” sign!

Of course, I felt really silly having thought that everyone was smiling just at my lens. Luckily, no one else knew my self-centered secret. 🙂

I moved around the corner to aim at the finish...

The 2014 Kyoto City Marathon is this weekend and the finish line is right by my place, so I may pop out again to see whether I can't do something more photographically worthy...

And that last picture provides the first real clue that this girl is not the maiko (apprentice geisha) that she otherwise appears to be, because I don't think that a real maiko would flash the peace sign for a passer's-by photo like this.

February 3rd is the cultural holiday setsubun, known for bean throwing, the warding off of evil spirits, and some Shinto rites that involve intense bonfires.

There's also an old tradition, fallen out of popularity in recent decades and now mostly unknown to the younger generations, of transforming your appearance for the day into something you're not... if you do this, so the tradition goes, you'll be free of evil spirits for the next year.

And that brings us to today's photos. Ikuko, the 20-year-old girl in these photos, is a normal collage student who transformed into a maiko for the Setsubun holiday.

For most girls wanting to do something like this (for the Setsubun holiday, or just for fun), Kyoto has plenty of places where one can pay some small fee to play dress-up as a maiko and go for an attention-grabbing photo-op stroll. I see it all the time, and these “fake maiko” are easy to spot (such as seen here) by their mannerisms and the cheap quality of their clothes and accessories, in the same way you can easily tell that the kid showing up at your doorstep on Halloween is not really Spider Man.

Ikuko, for her transformation, did something very different.

I showed these photos to an older lady who really knew the subject, and even when she saw the “Peace” photo she wasn't quite sure that Ikuko wasn't a real maiko, because everything else about her seemed spot-on correct.... because it was. The clothes and accessories are all real, as was the preparation: she had spent three and a half hours being prepared by a bevy of professionals that normally exclusively serve the real maiko and geiko (Kyoto geisha) population. People to do the hair (which, like a real maiko, is Ikuko's real hair), her makeup, and even a specialist to help her get into the kimono. Not many women, maiko and geiko included, can actually dress themselves in these kimono.

Having natural grace and class, as Ikuko does, helps to complete the package.

This kind of experience is just not something one can normally have, but Ikuko comes from an artist's family with connections in the wider cultural community (her dad is the potter mentioned here), so I suppose that's how this unique opportunity came about. Her family is friends with Zak's, and I met Ikuko a few years ago when she came to his house to babysit Zak's kids.

Zak was asked to take photos for Ikuko's “transformation”, and Zak was kind enough to invite me along as well.

The narrow streets made for a picturesque setting at times, and for mild crowded chaos at others. Japanese and foreign tourists alike would crowd in for photos of Ikuko, and with Ikuko.

I chose to include the picture above because I like the daring bold of the couple in the foreground, who had just had their photo taken with Ikuko. The fuzzy guy in the near foreground is a mailman who had just ridden his scooter through the scrum around Ikuko with a certain indifference that I'm sure comes from the frequency with which he encounters this kind of scene during the course of his day in Gion.

Ikuko was much more accommodating to stopping for others than a real maiko would be, so someone familiar with Kyoto would pretty quickly realize that she wasn't a maiko. Real maiko, when encountered out on the street like this, can not generally be accommodating to passers by because they are either working (and it would be rude to divert concentration from their customer for your photo), or they're busy on their way somewhere.

The evening after I took these photos, on the way back from dinner at Uroko with Damien, I came across two maiko, a geiko, and their customers piling into taxis near the Shijo Ohashi bridge. A crowd had gathered, but the maiko and geiko completely ignored everyone but their customers to the point that a maiko was almost plowed over because without looking she stepped right into the path of the flow of foot traffic on the sidewalk. The person who almost crashed into her happened to be the person right in front of me, and I'm glad there wasn't an “event” because I might have then tripped over both of them, and even if not, I didn't have my camera with me so what's the point?😉.

Anyway, I don't really care for the whole “geisha” thing and generally make a specific point not to pay attention when I come across them like this, but I really enjoyed the photoshoot with Ikuko. Perhaps it's because it was a normal Japanese girl dipping, just for a moment, into part of her cultural history in a culturally-authentic way.

Also, it helps that Ikuko was accommodating for photos and was just generally a nice person, and of course it helps a lot that, unlike the majority of maiko and geiko that I come across, she is actually attractive. I hope to do a “normal” photoshoot with her when the weather warms up, perhaps at the Haradanien Garden.

The forecast for last night and today was nonstop snow for Kyoto, so it was with disappointment but not surprise that I awoke to find just a thin scatter of snow. Sigh, why do I get my hopes up? Even just a few inches makes things wonderful, like this snow six years ago, but it doesn't happen often in the city.

In the end, Kyoto saw mostly rain, and Anthony's soccer practice was canceled, so we decided to take a drive up north for an hour or two (to near where I took Anthony skiing four years ago) to see whether they might have more snow.

They did, but not much.

The area we visited includes a rural street famous for being photogenically lined with trees. I'd first heard of it years ago when a photo by my doctor of it appeared on his computer's screensaver during an exam and I had to stop to ask about the location, but I'd not gotten to actually visit until today.

It was probably the worst possible time to visit.

The road is surprisingly long, stretching for 2½km (1½ miles) like this, lined with towering dawn redwood. Different areas have different vibes, but today everything was a resonating blah.

On this street was a small temple we stopped at because we noticed a huge pile of snow had accumulated under its steep roof, and Anthony was getting antsy to play...

The bottom inch or three was pure slush, but the big pile was playable snow, and play we did...

Fumie sat in the warmth of the car while letting Anthony and me play, and snapped a few photos through the foggy window with her phone...

(You'll notice that my photo is better than Fumie's, but that's only because I had a better camera 😉.)

Standing on top the snow pile brought me even with the edge of the roof....

At one point I wandered off to take some shots of the tree-lined street, and during that time Anthony returned to the car...

On the way home, in the encroaching dusk, we stopped by the southern end of the line of trees, and I snapped this photo of the nearby mountains enshrouded in mist and becoming enshrouded in dark...

Well, that wasn't fun. While at Anthony's soccer game the other day, I pulled my iPhone out of my pocket to find that a couple of apps had been “pocket deleted”, with the screen showing the dialog to confirm the deletion of a third. Apparently I put the phone in my pocket without deactivating the screen, and it bumped around in there in the just the appropriate way to jump through the hoops to delete an app. Twice. I should have had my pocket play the lottery that day.

I've been “pocket dialed” by friends before... the call comes in and all I hear is background noise or them chatting with someone without realizing that their phone has called me. This is the first time I've heard of apps getting deleted by accident this way, and the first time I've personally experienced my phone doing “pocket” anything, other than sitting there.

To make things worse, the two apps that had been deleted where the two apps I use the most (WhatsApp Messenger and Find my Friend), and to make it even super worster, those two apps have a lot of local data (permissions, history, connections, etc.) that are gone the moment you delete them, requiring a lot of hassle to set up again, so I couldn't just re-download from the Apple App Store™ and continue on my merry way. Arrrgh!.

To avoid having to set up the apps again, I had the bright idea of restoring the phone from a recent backup once I got home. iTunes makes a backup of the phone data when syncing, and I'd done it recently, so I though it would be a simple matter of pressing the “restore from backup” button in iTunes, but no, that results in a frustratingly final error message: "iTunes could not restore the iPhone because not enough free space is available on the iPhone." This made no sense to me because I wasn't asking for a second copy of everything to be added to the phone, but a simple(?) rsync-like “make sure what's supposed to be there is actually there” synchronization. It was extra frustrating because the error message gave no hint on how to proceed.

It turns out that the way around this is to reset the phone to its factory settings, then restore from backup. After doing the reset, iTunes treated it as if it was a new phone, asking “Do you want to set this up as a new phone, or restore from the ‘Jeff's iPhone’ backup we found lying around?”

I restored from backup, and 40 minutes of “doing stuff” in the background later, my phone was back to its pre-“pocket delete” glory. I'll have to be more careful next time.