cold cherry blossom

The cheery trees are blooming but it's still really cold and grey, not much of a spring and not good picnic weather. Haico and I are off to the mountains to walk from onsen to onsen through snow.

Back in Tokyo

Hanging out with Hanako and trying to get some more Fuji rubber stamp drawings made. It turned cold again after a wonderfully warm morning, so we set off to the sento to warm up. When we got there we found out our local one is closed on a Friday night, so with the help of Hanako's iphone we located the next closest and headed off to Ebius.

It was a great little place- a real old local, shoe lockers in the alcove straight off the street, dance hall like ceiling, fresh flowers and a Banto, my first. A banto is an old man or woman who you pay to get your ticket and who is sitting watching both sides of the bath house which is divided by a wall, not sure why we have to be watched, maybe in just "tradition". When we arrived we were the only ones there so we could take some photos, which is normally not allowed for obvious reasons. I love the roof and dome hair dryers. The roof in the bathing area was barrel vaulted and had sky blue, bamboo green, and peach wide stripes. Instead of Fuji as a “view” over the baths, there was photo wallpaper of a bamboo forest.

Haico and I meet up today-yah. Have been missing him.

For the views of Fuji from the Shinkansen from Nagoya to Tokyo check here.

Nara-conversations with deers

Unfortunately I missed the moment where this family was posing next to the deer is the usual style... and when the small child took a close up with his iphone... although dads casual close up is quite nice. I love how the deer doesn't move and looks completely bored. It might have been a bit about the weather - it was cold and rainy

Nara was pretty interesting. The deer around some of the temples seemed to be statues- not moving at all despite all the human activity, although there was area in further up towards the forest where deers would come running at you when they saw you turn up and if you bought the deer biscuits to feed them you would get mobbed. I didn't feed them- I couldn't cross that Australian native-non-feeding-attitude.

back checking..

So I am probably not doing this via "normal" blog protocols but some times I am posting things later into titles I have already made: eg Tokyo spat me out. So please scroll down and also visit my Fuji project blog magneticglimpses.

Kyoto

I was incredibly lucky to get a beautiful spring day on my one day in Kyoto. I had been planning to stay longer but I still have so much work to do and I need to make a research trip to Nagoya, as I will be in the next Aichi Triennale. That is this August so I also felt relaxed that I will be back soon and can go see Kyoto again.

I had an incredible day where I felt completely blessed and marvelled that my life had brought me to this beautiful place. I have never understood that phrase “so beautiful it hurts” until now and I can’t really find a way now why that was… or really another set of words to describe the feeling. Looking at nature always leaves me feeling elated joyful, and with a deep sense of satisfaction. This was a different response to the nature of the gardens and buildings of Kyoto. I felt a deep deep sigh and extreme pleasure in the looking, but also a kind of melancholic pain that I was on my own and not experiencing it with friends or family. Kyoto is not a place to go on your own, and mostly I saw people moving around the city in groups.

The thing I came to Kyoto for was the Inari shrine called Fushimi-Inari Taisha; it’s the most spectacular Inari shrine in Japan. I started to become interested in Inari shrines as I was seeing them at the starts of my forests walks. The figure of the fox at the edge of the forest is a symbol (or enactment) of the intermediary between the mortal and the spirit world. For me nature is the spirit world so that these shrines are at the beginning of my communing with nature has had resonance for me.

The feature of the Fushimi-Inari Taisha is its pathway through the forests at the edge of Kyoto where pilgrims walk under 10,000 red/orange Tori. Above are just three of the many pictures I took. Dotted along this route starting behind the main shrine and then climbing into the hills, are several points where there are fox pairs and alters. At the highest point over looking the city there was a semi circle of about 100 alters, all with fox pairs and Tori prayer offerings (second picture above). It was not the last time that day where I thought it was a good thing I had seen Kamakura before Kyoto. Don’t get me wrong Kamakura is very special and has things Kyoto doesn’t; it’s just not on the scale of Kyoto. Also Kyoto’s stone and moss gardens are hard to beat anywhere.

After spending a couple of hours walking the whole trail I head to Southern Higashiyama, which is close to where I was staying at Gojo. At this point I really felt like I had seen so many images of Kyoto but they where not connected with words… like which temple has the famous stone garden? Anyway I went to Kennin-ji, the oldest Buddhist temple in Kyoto, which has three very beautiful stone and moss gardens (I will post some more pictures either here or on flickr when I get back to free and fast internet). After that it was about 5:30 so I wandered along the streets towards Kiyomizu-dera-, which was an incredible building. I felt like I was in a Kurosawa movie. Then back to my fancy Ryokan to have a beautiful meal, missing Haico with each mouth full.

Beppu Yufu-Dake

Wind swept on the saddle of the summit.

With the friendly walkers who adopted me at the beginning.

View from the bottom- at the onsen we went to soak in post walk

View from the top - 1,548 metres above sea level.

The walk started in open fields; then through winter bare forests where gusts of wind lifted the deep layer of dried leaves into spectacular whirls; then cedar pines where we walked on the fallen pine needles releasing their perfumed oils; then up above the tree line clambering over volcanic rock of the long dormant volcano to the wind battered summit.

conversations with Beppu cats

View from my hotel window

Three different tabby's in central Beppu. The bottom photo is outside the Beppu Projects Office.

After living in a flat where you couldn’t open the windows for 10 weeks, it was an unbelieve joy to get to a hotel where you could open the window wide. Better still that it was a barmy humid Beppu in Kyushu.

One of the side effects of having the windows open means you hear the city. After 10 weeks with the drone of air conditioning and police sirens being the wallpaper sound scape (sirens being the only sound that cut through from outside), I thrilled to lie in bed and drift off to sleep to the sound of cats scrapping and tomcats wailing. It seems like a rare sound scape to me- the last time I remember hearing the sounds of stray cats like this would have been in Barcelona (10 years ago). Although there are stray cats in Marrickville, it’s not really a sound I hear much at home. I spent a couple of night and morning hanging out the window with my microphones recording their yowls echoing up from the walls below.

As you can see from the pictures above, most of the cats seemed to be tabby’s, I only saw one ginger tom- white with ginger patches. He was very large with lots of battle scares on his face.

Tokyo Spat me out

The last 3 days of a residency is always crazy. You try and do the things you definitely didn’t want to miss, plus still try to make work- all the while ignoring that you have to pack and clean.

This time wasn’t quiet as bad as when I left Barcelona on New Years Day 2000, but was close enough to make the memories very vivid. At about 2am I realised that I wasn’t going to get any sleep so I may as well have a cup of Earl Grey to get me through to when I had to leave at 4:45. I still feel a bit discombobulated, and can’t remember where I put things. Including two drawings that I had been working on in my last 48 hours, which I was meant to take with me to scan and send back to Australia. The brain works in strange ways on less sleep- I had some pretty odd trains of thought, but I made the first shinkansen and saw Fuji.

I was still a bit delirious when I got to Beppu. I was standing on the platform looking at a vending machine that read at first to me as “Devil’s Corner” until it morphed into Drinks Corner.

Speaking of the devil or spirits, there where many occasions during the residency when I thought I saw some one move out the corner of my eye or disappear around a corner in front of me. Tokyo Wonder site is an office building and you spend a lot of time walking from lifts to your flat, laundry or studio, down empty grey carpet tiled corridors. Most residents, and former residents, comment about the uncanny feeling to the building, however it didn’t feel that way to me, perhaps as it is like many of the new buildings I go into in Canberra or Sydney.

However I did wake up several nights because I thought I heard someone open my flat door. One night I had a really strange dream where one of the smoke detector workers (who had been into the flat the morning before the dream), wearing his pastel mint green uniform had just enter my flat, I had jumped out of bed to see who it was. He was standing by the door, but instead of a short haired clean shaven man it was the head of Stephen Mori- long grey haired, with long grey beard. I woke up in a sweat.

There are some small sculptures of a cone of salt in some of the corners of the corridors. I just assumed they where a left over intervention by a former resident, however when I went to dinner with Andre and Atsuki at the Kabuki bar the night before I left, I noticed that there where two small pile of salt on the footpath either side of the doorway. I asked about them and the woman said it was to keep away evil spirits. When I think of it now, the fact that an artwork would be left in place at Tokyo WS when they don’t even leave tea bags in the flats would seem a little odd. All of this said I didn’t ever feel scared just that there was a strong feeling of the building ghosted.

Inside of the Shinkansen. Breakfast on the Shinkansen. Check Magnetic Glimpses for the views of Fuji.

Packing and planning while working

Second last day here at Tokyo Wonder site. Photos above give should be compared with the first ones I posted. I don’t think it’s too bad… Could be worse, but still it’s going to take ages to sort it all out. I don’t know why I am such a paper hoarder- mainly because I am afraid of forgetting things. And a zine maker… this would look good, extra photocopy here of a page etc.

Working on some stamps at the moment- will post (ha! you are probably not believe those promises now).

This is the lovely JR lady fixing up my pass and booking my first trip to Beppu for Thursday morning. It’s going to be a 4:30am start- ouch! She used every one of those stamps in the kit to activate the pass. The large one set to the Japanese year calendar is my favourite.

Spring is almost here

Warmer days now and plum blossoms flowering. Trees are still bare and the sky is often grey. Asakusa temple on a day when I was riding the metro to find mechanised bird sounds. For the metro line change there you have to leave the station and walk through the temple.