Posted in travel and places, kyoto on Dec 28th, 2006 No Comments »
Yamashina Station, Kyoto, in the mild light of a winter afternoon.
The mountains behind the station are one of my favorite scenes. The residential area between station and mountains is called Anshu; at the back, on the mountain slope stands Bishamondo Temple.
Posted in writing and poetry, travel and places, temples, kyoto on Dec 27th, 2006 No Comments »
In my previous post I have discussed an article from the magazine Serai about the poetry anthology Hyakunin Isshu and also mentioned that various places in Kyoto are still associated with poems from the popular classic. I have visited several of these spots in the last few years and here are the first three Hyakunin […]
Posted in writing and poetry, books, culture, travel and places, intercultural on Dec 26th, 2006 No Comments »
Hyakunin Isshu (”One Hunderd Poets, One Poem Each”) is Japan’s most famous compact anthology of classical poetry. About 800 years ago, Fujiwara Teika, himself an accomplished poet, compiled it in his residence on Mt Ogura, in Arashiyama near Kyoto, by selecting the in his view best waka poems from previous imperial collections.
Thanks to the […]
Posted in books, culture, life on Dec 26th, 2006 No Comments »
When I studied Chinese characters (kanji) my teacher strongly advised me to practice by writing them. Only after you remembered the strokes with your pen (or pencil or writing brush), he said, could you also remember them with your eyes.
I was reminded of my kanji practice of more than thirty years ago by the recent […]
Posted in travel and places, temples on Dec 20th, 2006 No Comments »
Bessho Onsen is a ninth century spa that was propelled into cultural significance when it became the headquarters of a Kamakura period governor. This governor hailed from the Hojo clan, the de facto rulers of Japan. He transformed the remote mountain bastion into an elegant capital. A shadow of that old glory still survives in […]
Posted in writing and poetry, history, religion and philosophy, gardens, temples, kyoto on Dec 6th, 2006 No Comments »
One of Kyoto’s most magic places stands in the northwestern part of the city, hidden behind an unobtrusive gateway.
Fifty years ago still countryside, now this has squarely become part of the city. But Shisendo, the Hall of the Poetry Immortals, is in itself contained, a form shut off from its surroundings by tall trees, in […]
Posted in architecture, travel and places, museums on Dec 4th, 2006 No Comments »
There is not much to see in literature museums, but in the case of the Kamakura Museum of Literature you come for the great house and spacious garden. A Western-style villa right in the middle of the old warrior capital! The art deco manor was built in 1936 by the Maeda family, who had been […]
Posted in travel and places, temples, kyoto on Dec 3rd, 2006 No Comments »
Koka, the southern part of Shiga Prefecture, is ninja country. The ninja were professional spies, possessing their own camouflage techniques and specialized tools, and they flourished in the wars of the medieval period. As so many things in Japan, they developed their own schools and regional varieties, of which Koka was one of the most […]
Posted in writing and poetry, books on Dec 2nd, 2006 No Comments »
Basho is by far the most popular Japanese author. Strangely enough, there still is no annotated scholarly translation of his complete work. The Narrow Road has been translated tens of times, and a few hundred of his most popular haiku exist in countless versions (there is even a whole book dedicated to different versions […]
Posted in writing and poetry, museums on Dec 1st, 2006 No Comments »
Our blogging maiko is still blogging on, now with an article about autumn.
It so happens that autumn is her favorite time to read books (as is the case for most Japanese, that is why the expression “dokusho no aki,” or “autumn for reading” is so common).
Ichimame divulges to us that she is reading a book […]
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