Autum dark, autumn light


11th December 2011


When the crowds show up at Kodai-ji on autumn evenings, this is probably what they're hoping to see.





The queue can be long but there are things to see on the way to the temple's ticket office.
































And the wait, I think, is worth it.

































The water was so clear we got two autumn landscapes for the price of one.

















Though this young gentleman was more interested in the lights than in what was being lit up.




I hope he saw the phoenix though.





















And the gold on the hall where the temple's founder, Nene, is enshrined.












If you follow the arrows along the path, they will take you to a bamboo grove...








...then lead you back to the start for one last look.

Tamasaburo V


29th November 2011


More womanly than women themselves - that's how the men who play female roles in kabuki theatre are sometimes described.

But the onnagata - literally, female form - will say that they do not try to be women or even imitate them. They aim to be onnagata.

In 1629, the shogunate banned women from performing in public - ostensibly because of the audience brawling over actresses - so the female roles went first to boys and then to men.

Over the 360-odd years of kabuki history, men came up with an artificial image of women. These stage women walked a certain way, spoke a certain way, danced a certain way. The point was not to be true to real life; the point was to be true to kabuki.

Probably the most famous onnagata alive is Bando Tamasaburo V, known not only for his career in kabuki but also for crossing genres in collaborations with people like Yo-Yo Ma.

Earlier this month, Tamasaburo V was presented with the Kyoto Prize, a 50 million yen award given out each year by the Inamori Foundation, set up by the founder of manufacturing company Kyocera.

As part of a series of events held in conjunction with the award ceremony, Tamasaburo and the other two laureates - both scientists - held lectures, workshops and forums.

Most of the events took at the Kyoto International Conference Centre, where there was also a Tamasaburo photo exhibition. I took a lot of photos of people taking photos of photos.






















In 2008, Tamasaburo appeared with China's Suzhou Kunqu Opera Company, playing the female lead (in photo of photo above) in The Peony Pavilion: a role that he said he spent three years preparing for.





A 2009 photo by Takashi Okamoto of Tamasaburo in Sagi Musume (Heron Maiden). The dancer plays both a tortured heron spirit and a girl in love.





Another notable role: the courtesan Akoya in Dannoura Kabuto Gunki. Photo by Takashi Okamoto.





Make-up is an important part of role creation in kabuki, with actors adding their own individual twists to the "face" of a character.


A few days after the prize presentation was a student forum.

I still remember his hands. For a country where people prefer to use their hands to make things than to talk, Tamasaburo's hands carried on a dialogue all by themselves.




A lot of the photos looked like this: face clear and hands a blur because they wouldn't stop moving.

Here's one sequence:














Dancers are the people who move even when sitting still.

Why staff in Japanese bookshops wear aprons


16th November 2011


Because if you're not careful, books will spill ink all over you.

Pagong


1st October 2011


Change doesn't always happen quickly in Kyoto but an old kimono-dyeing company has reinvented itself as a producer of Japanese-inspired Western clothes.

The company, Kamedatomi, has also come up with its own clothing line and branched out into bags and other accessories.

The clothing line, Pagong, stands apart because its designs come from the patterns the company has collected over decades. Once meant for kimono, the patterns now adorn T-shirts, tank tops and, er, aloha shirts.





















I managed to persuade one of the sales staff at the Pagong shop in Gion to model a T-shirt for me. I also managed to visit the company's dyeing factory in the west of Kyoto.




The floor where dye is painstakingly painted onto rolls of fabric. What looks like a Jackson Pollock carpet is actually a drop cloth spattered with stray dye.





An artisan brushing dye onto fabric with the help of a stencil. The strength applied has to be equal right to left and top to bottom or the colours won't look even.




Finished design samples waiting for a colour check on the dyeing floor.
















A stairway mural. This is how factories should be decorated.





The CEO of the company, Mr Kazuaki Kameda, is also its creative engine. This is from his Rakugaki (Graffiti) series. First came the artwork then the bag.








I've never seen a bamboo forest in a storm but perhaps it's something like this.

Summer in the garden with geisha


16th September 2011


Summer's not all about suffering in the heat, not when you have beer gardens sprouting up like first aid stations.

But the beer garden at Kamishichiken has something the others don't: geisha.












Umesaya the maiko at our table. She answered our questions about life as an apprentice geisha, posed for photos and turned a chopsticks wrapper into a little boat that worked as a chopsticks holder. When someone remarked on it, she held an impromptu origami class.












For 1,800 yen, you get a mug of beer, hiyayakko (cold tofu) and edamame. But you can add other things from the menu. We ordered tamago yaki (egg rolls), burdock fries and takoyaki (in photo).














The beer garden became a different place in the dark. The maiko and geisha looked even more glamorous, if that's possible.





Tables were set up not only in the garden but also along the corridor outside the hall where the geisha of Kamishichiken dance.















The white circles on the lanterns represent dango (rice dumplings): this is the crest of the Kamishichiken geisha district.





You could get lost among the lanterns. I really wouldn't mind.

Seeing stars


16th August 2011


Kyoto city's celebrations for the star festival of Tanabata ended yesterday with the close of Kyo no Tanabata, a 10-day event staged at different spots.

I spent a few sweaty hours at the site beside Horikawa, a river in the west of the city. This is what it looked like before the crowds arrived.





Bamboo art installation. Those probably aren't mosquito nets though they would have been entirely appropriate given the number of times I was bitten.





Decorations made famous by the celebrations in Sendai, which holds one of the largest Tanabata festivals in Japan. Those decorations are huge - as if they'd been made by a race of giants keen on handicrafts and jellyfish.





In its non-festival hours, the Horikawa site is a park for residents.




Fire-fighting in Kyoto begins with a red bucket. The bucket is always filled - fire seems to be a bigger worry than mosquito-breeding.













Everything looked different once night fell and the spotlights came on in the bamboo grove. Strips of paper with wishes on them had been hung up among the leaves as well as decorations like this one.





The highlight of the celebrations at the Horikawa site: a tunnel evoking the Milky Way, which separates Orihime the weaver and Hikoboshi the cowherd for 364 days a year. The Sky Emperor allows them to meet on the seventh day of the seventh month but if the weather's bad, they won't.

In all the shots I took of the tunnel, this was the only one where the light at the end formed a perfect heart.

So maybe things worked out for Orihime and Hikoboshi this year.





In the river, fabric from one of the city's dyers was displayed: a nod to the past practice of washing excess dye out of kimono material in the river.















The changing lights constantly remade the same stretch of cloth.














A cry went up among the crowd when these blue LED balls came bobbing down the river.













Releasing the balls into the river. He had a walkie-talkie - wrapped in plastic - to communicate with those downstream and a stopwatch hanging from his neck. He would check it before dropping the balls into the water; he was probably on a schedule.





The first electric tram in Japan apparently crossed a bridge over the Horikawa. The tram is long gone but this remains.





The Sendai decorations at night.





Water wheels were set up near the streamers with messages to the March disaster victims fixed to the blades. This wheel said, "You're not alone".