Miscellany

Gentle viewers: this post has absolutely no focus whatsoever. It's essentially going to be a jumble of mostly unrelated thoughts and observations...accompanied by some random photos from the Shijo area which I took a couple of months ago and promptly forgot.

When visiting Loft, a depaato, I found this great collection of digital illustrations/drawings: mostly printed on postcards, but there were a couple of larger prints, and also printed handkerchiefs. I ended up grabbing a bunch of postcards, since they were cheap and I could buy more. Seems I was attracted to two particular artists (or maybe they were the only ones whose work was merchandised there, not sure): Kaori Wakamatsu and Eri Kamijo. You can see some of the Eri Kamijo postcards I bought here and Kaori Wakamatsu's here. Some really beautiful, stunning pieces.

On a musical note, a couple of months ago, my friend Mark introduced me to Kate Covington, aka katethegreat19. She makes covers and does really beautiful arrangements of songs from games, anime, and a few movies. And by makes, I mean that she does the singing and all of the instrumental parts and records it all herself.
Pretty impressive. Just to give you an general idea, here are some of my favorites of her arrangements/covers:
Rose of May, You're Not Alone, both from Final Fantasy IX, Aerith's Theme from Final Fantasy VII, Lament of the Highborne from World of Warcraft, Serenade from Fruits Basket, Once Upon a December from Anastasia, Come Little Children from Hocus Pocus, and the Silent Hill 2 Music Box theme. So, if you hail from Geekland and enjoy music, you might want to check out her channel on YouTube.

While I was sitting in a McDonald's eating dinner sometime the other week, I'll Make a Man Out of You came up on my iPod. It started playing right when a cross-dresser and and his friend (a lady who was not cross-dressing) sat down at the table next to me.
Eheheh.

There have also recently been a couple of hilarious moments of English, er....

faux pas is perhaps too strong of a word...
In my Japanese business and management class several weeks ago, our professor passed around a sheet of paper for us to write down our topics for presentation. When the paper finally came around to me, I took a look to see what other people were doing, out of curiosity. A bunch of the foreign students already had their topics picked out--the Nintendo 64 in Video Games, the Business of Maid Cafes, etc, etc--and then it came to the Japanese students. About four or five Japanese names down the list, each with the words, "I have not it decided" written next to them. Just below theirs was Ben's name--Ben, who was paired with one of the Japanese students for doing the presentation. Seeing as he and his partner hadn't decided what their topic was, he had followed suite in indicating so:

"I have not it decided."

I just about died right in the middle of class.

I've heard multiple accounts of this before, but it continues to be funny for some reason. Usually when one of us international students must turn down an invitation from a Japanese student, for whatever reason, homework, other plans, the typical Japanese text response goes thusly:

"It is so. Then there is no help for it."

It's great, because you know what they're trying to say, or what they would say if they had said it in Japanese: "Sou desu. Shikatanai." What they text to us in English is a direct translation of these expressions, basically, but would perhaps have sounded a lot better as "I see, that's too bad" or "All right, maybe another time." The shikatanai expression is among one of those phrases which reflect the Japanese sense of things being out of their hands. You know how in English we have the active and passive voice? Well, Japanese has several grammatical constructions to express passivity: transitive verbs followed by "-te aru" (which essentially translates to "the thing was verbed"), passive forms of verbs (Someone is/was verbed by someone/something), the causative-passive form of verbs (Someone was made to do verb by someone/something)...While in English writing, our teachers discourage us from using the passive voice too much, in Japanese, using passive expressions makes actions more indirect, and therefore more polite.

"When the storm draws nigh
Dreams will shatter before your eyes
Know that you're not alone
When the battle starts
I will comfort your restless heart
You'll know that you are home"

~You're Not Alone, katethegreat19

Hearth, Painting, and Bell

Last weekend I biked quite a ways down Kamogawa, to the Kyoto International Community House in the Higashiyama area of town. Note to self: rain ponchos are feeble against the might of summer torrential downpours. When I arrived at KICH about half an hour before the shodou class, I was completely soaked. After checking at the desk for the the room number, I wandered around the surrounding area for a bit, but not far enough to manage a temple visit before the class.

At first, it was just the two lady instructors and myself for a while. We exchanged introductions, and they had me pick out a kanji to practice. Matsutake looked like fun, so I went with it. The first kanji, 松 (matsu), means "pine tree," and the second, 茸 (take), by itself refers to "mushroom." The older lady showed me how to write it: first the stroke order, than the variances in pressure of the lines. She taught me how to write it with dark, heavy lines...I kind of want to learn the thin, light, smokey sort-of hand in calligraphy, but I suspect it's more difficult, and it's probably better as a beginner to keep a heavy hand.

This gentleman, a master calligrapher who dropped in a little while after the class started, helped me figure out my name in kanji. On my school papers and official documents, my name is written in katakana, the Japanese phoenetic alphabet used for words and names of foreign origin: ロー・エリン. When Western names are written in kanji, there are two options: translate the name's meaning into Japanese or use kanji which match the name phonetically. I'd already had specific characters in mind for my first name, although I was still trying to choose between two possibilites: 絵林 or 絵鈴. 絵 (e, pronounced "eh") is the Japanese word for a picture, painting, or drawing. 林 as a word by itself means "woods" and the kun-yomi is hayashi but its on-yomi is rin. The on-yomi for 鈴 is also rin, but its kun-yomi is suzu, meaning "bell." I ended up picking the combination of 絵 and 鈴 for the musicality I suppose...The gentlemen did some searching around on his denshi jisho for a kanji for my surname. In the end, he settled on 炉: excellent discretion on his part, methinks. 炉  only has the on-yomi pronunciation ro, meaning "hearth" or "fireplace" although it can also refer to a furnace or kiln.

 

After a long while of practicing, I made two careful "final" pieces (pictured above.) It still needs work, but I vastly improved over the course of only an hour of practice, so I felt pretty good. After another hour several more people showed up, although only a couple of them practiced their calligraphy. Mostly at that point everyone was conversing together, and having tea with snacks. Once the time slot for the class ended, I thanked everyone for their help, and biked over to Nanzenji, the nearest temple, to see if I could get in a quick visit.

Nanzenji, built in 1264, is a temple belonging to a sect of the Rinzai school of Zen. Originally the Emperor Kameyama's villa, then called Zenrinjiden, he donated it as a Zen temple in 1291 when he became a monk. Inside the main pavilion is the karesansui Hojo Garden, also called Toranoko watashi, "tiger cubs crossing water," because of the shapes of the rocks. The famous landscape architect Kobori Enshu supposedly designed Hojo Garden, which belongs to a style of garden design developed after the early Edo period in the 1600, with most of the stones and trees arranged together at one side of a large, open, empty space.

There are smaller gardens surrounding all sides of the main building.

 

A moss garden, or kokeniwa

 

This is called Suiroraku, a famous brick aqueduct which was a part of a waterway

used to channel water from Biwa-ko to Kyoto

 

The Sanmon gate

 

An intriguing building I passed on the bike ride home

 

This little store I peeked into on the way back had a pretty little

rock garden outside the window on the roof, next to the staircase.

Because Shopping is Cheaper Than a Psychiatrist

買物は生死に学者より安いだよ。

"Shopping is cheaper than a psychiatrist."

Wise words printed on my shopping bag which I bought from the dollar store before I cam here. The plastic's slowly eroding off it, but this was the first bit of humor I successfully translated into Japanese. Situational humor aside, it can be a little difficult to make jokes in Japanese when it's not your native language. Sarcasm's out of the question, because, well, it doesn't really exist in Japanese. It's not that the Japanese always say what they mean; in fact, they have a tendency to circumvent. It's commonly described as "talking around" the subject. Takagi-sensei always drew spirals on the board to demonstrate this. But sarcasm, saying the exact opposite thing, is usually lost on Japanese. Best just to stay away from it--otherwise you may end up unintentionally insulting something or someone.

I had a battle plan for this day too...or at least a road map. My targets were mostly acquired from the Lonely Planet guidebook for Kyoto: stores selling traditional Kyoto (and Japanese in general) crafts. From Shijo-Karasuma station, the first stop were the Takaya stores. The first I stopped at specialized in traditional fabric crafts: noren, pillows--lots of pillows--tenugui,
and the like.

Found a couple of cute kitteny characters down an alley

Kitties!

After the first Tanakaya, I took my first pass through Nishiki Market, which eventually ends at the Teramachi and Shinkyougoku shopping arcades (which I have been through several times by now.) Nishiki Market is likewise a covered arcade, only the vendors specialize in food, rather than clothing, craft, and souvenir shops. Although while weaving through the market, I did find a couple of interesting shops selling traditional shoes, hand-painted paper fans, and little cat handbags. At this tiny hole-in-the-wall, I found the most beautiful fan with a graceful ink brush painting of koi. I really need to get back into practicing my brush painting.

The second Tanakaya store is on the opposite side of Nishiki Market, a few blocks southeast of the first shop, and specializes in all kinds of traditional Japanese dolls. After some admiring and gawking at the prices, I finished walking through the rest of Nishiki, and continued east through Teramachi. A couple of blocks further, near Kawaramachi-dori, I found Nijuusanya, a store which sells modern Japanese hair accessories and traditional carved wooden (and tortoiseshell, I believe) combs and hairpieces. Most of the items were a little on the expensive side, so I took a particular interest in the their less-expensive hair sticks. There were three different, gracefully carved designs, matsu needle, ginkgo leaf, and tsuru head, which came in the plain polished wood, or smooth painted black. I had a bit of a time choosing between the ginkgo and tsuru, but eventually went with the shop-lady's suggestion of the black crane. I also made a stop at Tsujikura to admire their small gallery of beautiful, high-quality paper wagasa and lanterns, before traveling north up Kawaramachi-dori to browse through the foreign (aka English) section of the Junkudou bookstore.

Strange things were afoot at the Circle K...The sign on the far left in the photo tells passersby that this was the site of Ryoma Sakamoto and Shintaro Nakaoka's assassinations in 1867. Sakamoto and his friend Nakaoka, who were very influential in the Meiji Restoration, were meeting at the Omiya soy sauce shop when they were murdered by
a group calling themselves "Totsugawa warrior." These days, a Circle K stands on the spot, and most people pass by without taking any notice of the sign. These two I caught in the picture happened to give it a glance, although that may have been because I was actually stopped in front of it, and standing in the middle of the sidewalk amidst fairly heavy pedestrian traffic in attempts to get a good shot of the site.

I made a pit-stop at Wonder Tower to play a couple rounds of much-needed DDR...

but I miss Kylie Minogue, and Breakdown!...

Lastly, I walked back down to Shijo-dori, and finally walked  north through Ponto-cho.

In olden days, Ponto-cho was Kyoto's red-light district...

Today, the street is lined with restaurants, teahouses, and bars.

I had a giggle when I passed a jazz bar called Hello Dolly.

Ponto-cho is supposed to be one of the particular places where geiko and maiko-sightings are fairly common--but this is usually during weekend evenings.

No geiko sightings for me tonight. I shall have to revisit

sometime on an actual weekend evening.

It was still a lovely, lantern-lit, and photographically fruitful evening stroll.

And I found this gorgeous hanging ornament outside one of the teahouses.