Japan dream number nine

 

As my darling wife recently observed, we have been in France now for not much more than half the time we were in Japan. This is mind boggling because in some ways it feels like we have been in France forever now, whereas Japan seems like some kind of passing dream. 

But if I look back, Japan was complicated, and with the crushing heat of the first couple of weeks, the sheer bewilderment of the place, the urban intensity beyond anything I'd ever experienced,  it took some time to just find our feet there. The luxury of a month in Kyoto was the opportunity to fidget and suffer and seep into the place until we filled every coffee house and tea room in the city, to understand that just like everyone else in the world we are not like other people.

I am making my tenth attempt to put together a final folder of images from Japan, a diverse and finished series. And while I do this it is a good time to show some of these images here again, some for the first time, some slightly polished, and some probably largely as seen before, but all of them now with a few notes of context that perhaps can help them out, as they are all built off of real pictures.

While these are built off of real photographs, some, like this first one, travelled a long way from the original. There are too many additions and alterations to the image below for me to remember them all at this point, but these changes came from a desire to express how strongly I felt about this small garden that was part of a museum gallery in the Arashiyami area of Kyoto. Arashiyama, which we never returned to, was nevertheless a key turning point in our visit to Kyoto, where we finally started to blend into the city. We had come some way to visit a show of ceramics there featuring one of my wife's favorite artists, Lucie Rie, but the museum or gallery was as much like someone's beautiful, almost perfect Japanese home, and the area itself, famous for its bamboo groves, was a kind of relief from the relentlessness of the city we lived in.

I cannot begin to remember from where I took this next image, as these small charms were everywhere, and for a time I was taking endless pictures of building facades, which in Kyoto were ubiquitous, wildly diverse and charming. Houses in Japan are strikingly private and from the street I almost never caught a glimpse inside in any light. Perhaps this also allowed for the houses to present with such composure and completeness.

 Since most of these were from our quietly bustling, faded and rich, unfamous neighborhood, there is a good chance this picture is from there too.

And here we are in Tokyo, where I am endeavoring to give off the sheer urbanity of the city and its feeling of being different and full at every inch. I took this gritty view from the window of a glossy clothing store that I bought two brown shirts from.