Japan – Don't hold your breath

Wakaura harbour

Luck eluded us on our visits to fishing towns on the coast of Wakayama peninsula. We visited two, on different days of the week, and found the village shut down in each case. We’d left Wakaura bay for the last day of our visit to Japan, and it was a bit of a shock to find the docks so completely deserted. Boats were tied up neatly. Fishing nets had been cleaned and spread out to dry. Flocks of noisy gulls were conspicuously absent. At the far end a fish shop was open. Cars came in one by one as we watched. Someone would get down, buy fish and leave. Eventually we walked up to investigate. Some shirasu (whitebait) was drying on mesh tables, and a vwry kind lady offered us some. This is the local delicacy. Since most restaurants were closed, we never got to taste the local shirasu-don. We did have a plate of sashimi for lunch, and enjoyed more of the Kansai-style shirasu.

The harbour being closed turned out to be a bit lucky for us, as we discovered as we walked out along a pier towards the lighthouse at the end. The harbour was full of interesting birds. The highlight was our first ever sighting of the Japanese cormorant (Phalacrocorax capillatus). The strong sun, the absolute quiet, and the birds were quite a contrast to the reminders of the normally busy dockside in the moored boats, drying nets and floaters.

We got warmer as we walked. Our layers began to come off. There was an interesting stone arch ahead and we walked off along the beach towards it. Unfortunately it turned out to be impossible to get a photo of the opening of the arch. Most views were as you see above. It was time now to go find a place for lunch. As we walked along the beach I found an interesting bird’s track. The Family wondered “Can the middle toe really be that long?” Unlikely, probably the heron had been dragging something in its beak. It was lunchtime for everyone.

Wakayama Toshogu Shrine: Monday Art

Much less known than the shrine to Tokugawa Iyeasu in Nikko is the one in Wakaura bay, near Wakayama city. The Nikko Toshogu was founded in 1617 and now sees two million visitors every year. The Kishu Toshogu was built in 1621 and sees barely any tourists. When we visited in December we were the only foreigners. There was one Japanese family looking at the shrine at the same time as us. On our last day of sightseeing in Japan I was glad we found such a remarkable place to visit. The photo of the sleeping cat that you see above comes from the Kishu Toshogu and is attributed to the artist Hidari Jingoro. There is of course a more well-known version of it, also by the same artist, in Nikko.

We climbed the 108 steps to the entrance, counting each step as we went. As we caught our breath at the top we turned to look at the view of the bay. “So beautiful,” exclaimed The Family. The shrine was also beautiful, in a much more understated way than in Nikko. This was commissioned by Tokugawa Yorinobu, one of Iyeasu’s sons, when he took over as daimyo. There is a story about lords and samurai carrying stones up to the top for the building of the shrine. As a result, the climb is called the samurai-zaka. After the climb I could understand why this act was deemed to be a splendid show of fealty to the daimyo. The courtyard was calm and quiet. We bought our entry tickets and were told that we could take photos outside the shrine but not inside.

The shrine is beautiful, but not as grand and extensive, as its more famous predecessor. We looked at the guardian statues, the pair of well-armed zuijin or warrior monks. Their wide eyes were alert to all evil, and between them they say aum: one’s mouth open to pronounce the syllable au, the other closed to say m. This is how the Sanskrit word om enters into use in Japan. There are many beautiful painted panels. The one that you see in the gallery here is one above the entrance. The vermilion of the gate and the red and black lacquer-work on the panels sets off the glowing colours of this painting. A modern addition was this collection of WWII-era artillery shells surrounded by Jizo statues. Is it a memorial to children who died in the war?

Leftovers

Not literally. This food was freshly made. But leftover metaphorically. There are things I didn’t manage to post from our trip to China and Japan at the end of last year, and this is one of them. Winter in Kansai is a lovely time. The leaves turn colour between mid-November and mid-December. Along with this autumn glory is typical winter food. Walking in Osaka’s Nakanoshima, an island in the middle of Ajigawa, we were chilled by the cold breeze. I suggested oden for lunch and explained to The Family that it is a soupy one-dish meal made by boiling many ingredients in dashi. She thought it could be right for the day.

We found a shopping arcade in the basement levels below a hotel. Osaka is surprisingly full of what you could literally call an underground food scene. Several eateries there had good reviews. We chose one which advertised oden. There is sufficient variety that we could have two bowls which looked quite different. I had the default meaty one, but The Family scrutinized the menu and found one with more vegetables and tofu, which is the traditional ingredient.

Afterwards we had a choice of walking to the metro station underground or go back up to the surface. Fortified by the warming meal, we decided to brave the blustery surface. And it was good that we did, because we came on a beautiful carpet in the lobby of the hotel. The profusion of maple and ginkgo leaves and the warm orange-gold of the body told us that this had been laid out for the season.

Yoshiki Garden: Monday Art

Yoshigawa, one of the several small rivers which thread through Nara lends its name to a garden built next to its bank in 1919 CE. We walked in through a simple bamboo gate and found the first of three parts of the garden, the pond garden. It’s a beautiful natural bowl, as you can see in the photo below, with the pond at the bottom. Autumn in this part of Japan comes in December. Already, before 3 in the afternoon the shadows were lengthening. The pond with its artful stepping stones were in shadow. We climbed up to a platform overlooking the pond, but the sun was in our eyes. It was better to stand in the shade and admire the way this part of the garden was laid out in an echo of the Edo-period style of gardens.

The next section was the moss garden with its carpet of haircap mosses (genus Polytrichum). It looked pretty lush to me, but it is apparently at its most lush during the local rainy season. I’d once come for a meeting to Nara in that season, and now I wished I’d walked in to see the garden then. I admired the tachi-doro style stone lantern in the middle of one section (you can see it in one of the photos below). In autumn there were various herbs growing on the slope next to it. The contrast between the closed in chisen-style pond garden and the flat expanse of the moss garden was part of the art of this layout.

A third part of the garden is the cha-niwa, the thatched tea house which you can see beyond the stone lantern in the photo above. We stood there for a while, listening to the delightful songs of birds in the maple trees above us. I tried to make a recording, after all the sound of a garden is as important as its look. But there were too many tourists (the garden is free for foreigners), and their conversations, although hushed, intruded on the recording. So we took the path up to the area behind where the maples were in glorious sun-bright colour. That is what the featured photo shows.

Contemporaries: Monday Art

Japan’s National Gallery of Art Osaka (NMAO) is housed in an incredible structure, so contemporary that it seems to take off into the stratosphere on dragonfly wings. Fortunately this collection of stunning contemporary art from across the world is housed in a subterranean structure which anchors the dragonfly sitting over it. We descended into the gallery, paid for our tickets and walked in.

National Museum of Art Osaka, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, 2007

Sun Yang (born in 1972 in Beijing) and Peng Yu (born in 1974 in Heilongjiang) pursued brief individual careers before they began to collaborate on conceptual pieces which are often deemed controversial or confrontational. This stunning piece from 2007 is entitled I Am Here.

National Museum of Art Osaka, Richard Tuttle, 2013

This is a mixed media work from 2007 made by the post-minimalist artist Richard Tuttle. Born in New Jersey in 1942, he has explored many media, and moves between New York, New Mexico and Maine.

National Museum of Art Osaka, Ulala Imai, 2023

This image from 2023 is typical of the work of Ulala Imai, who uses pop culture iconography and everyday scenes from her life to make her work in many media. She works in Kanagawa where she was born in 1982.

National Museum of Art Osaka, Cao Fei, 2023

Cao Fei is a multimedia artist who lives and works in Beijing where she produced this work on an inkjet printer in 2023. She was born in Guangzhou in 1978, and tries to capture the life of her post-Cultural Revolution generation and as it is influenced by trends from across the world.

It’s a pity that I cannot show you some of the videos in the collection of the National Museum in Osaka. But I hope that what I have shown here says something about the breadth of its collection. There were several pieces that were beautiful, but I felt could not be captured with a mobile phone.

The temple which lost its history

history immeasurably is wealthier
by a single sweet day’s death
e e cummings (1952)

Old pilgrim’s trails wind through the Wakayama prefecture, and make up the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage routes. But apart from this, there is the Saigoku Kannon pilgrimage which starts from the Seiganto-ji temple near Nachi waterfall, and takes in thirty three temples across the Kansai area. Pilgrims visit temples dedicated to Kannon, the Bodhisattva of compassion, originally Avalokiteshwara. The second temple on this route is the Kongoho-ji near Wakayama. It is more well known by the name Ki-mii-dera, which refers to three famous wells located inside the temple.

I’d read about the lovely sunsets over Wakanoura bay which are visible from this temple, so we decided to go there one afternoon. We took a train to the Kimiidera station. The temple was a short walk away, and we unknowingly took a side road up. But let me show you the pictures in the order we would have taken if we had entered through the main Sakuramon gate (I liked that guardian next to it). The temple is known for its 1200 cherry trees, so I guess this might be on our spring itinerary one year. Beyond this is a steep climb of 231 steps; or you could use a funicular. Since we came down, we used the stairs.

I knew little about the temple apart from the cherry blossoms and the sunset. There is a legend that it was founded by a Chinese priest called Iko Shonin in 770 CE. It is said that he received six cherry seeds from the Dragon King’s daughter, which grew into the trees that are seen today. But all we know for certain is that during the 15th and 16th centuries, the Sengoku period, when Japan had broken up into multiple houses battling each other, and former vassals had risen against their feudal lords, the monks of this temple had organized into an army, along with local peasants, to defend their territory. That came to an end when Toyotomi Hideyoshi attacked the temple in 1548 during his campaign to unify Kansai. Much was destroyed in this battle, including records of the history of the temple.

Today the main hall of the temple holds a gold-foil covered 12 meters tall statue of Kannon with many arms. “Impressive,” The Family said as she tried to take a photo of the statue. It was impossibly foreshortened. There’s a story about Iko Shonin carving the statue and placed a small statue of the Buddha in its womb. There is in fact a Buddha statue in a separate enclosure in the temple, which is shown to the public every fifty years. In any case, the current statue of Kannon was completed only in 2008.

Next to one of the wells that gives the temple its name I saw a beautiful statue of Kannon. The cherry trees that the temple is famous for were bare, but there were other trees that gave it a bit of colour even in mid-December. Elsewhere there were casks of the alcohol. I wonder whether they are brewed here, or only kept here as an offering; I couldn’t find any information about it. The temple precinct is not large, but it was worth the visit. Of course, we were very lucky with the light.

Momijigari

Our trip to Japan had been planned for one purpose only: to see the leaves change colour. Japan has rather accurate predictions of when leaves will change colour, so I could fit this trip into my work travels provided we travelled only in Kansai. Then, of course, we had to start with Kyoto. A little search was enough to tell me which gardens are the most spectacular, and among them I prioritized places that we had not seen. So our first destination was Nanzen-ji. We had planned to end a spring time walk once at this temple, but I’d turned into a swamp creature in the rain that day, and called it quits after reaching the gate that you see in the featured photo. This was the starting point of our momijigari, walk under maples, on this trip.

We passed through the gate into a land of colour. Nanzen-ji has extensive gardens and grounds, planted with maples. and they had all turned red. It was a sunny day, but with a brisk wind which made the fluffy clouds skid across the sky. Lots of people were out and taking photos of the colours. Most of them were dressed pretty warmly, so we didn’t feel too out of place in our caps and jackets.

When you walk through Nanzen-ji today it is hard to imagine that it was built in the most turbulent period of Japanese history. The failed Mongol invasion of Japan in the 13th century CE led to the Shogunate’s direct intervention in the Imperial succession, forcing the emperor Kameyama to abdicate. He converted a villa into this temple and became a Zen monk. The structures have been destroyed many times and rebuilt. The Sanmon was rebuilt in the 17th century by Tokugawa Iyeasu to commemorate those who fell in his campaign to take Osaka Castle. There is a sub-temple, Nanzenin, now located at the site of the original imperial villa.

And then there is the Biwa canal aqueduct, built during the Meiji era. This may look incongruous in the setting, but it has been adopted by locals as a favourite spot for shoots. I could see the attraction. The immense brick structure, weathering away, gives lovely perspectives. I did a bit of ambush photography here. A lady urged us to let her take our photo in this setting, and we gladly agreed.

I spent a bit of time next to the aqueduct, trying to take photos of the glowing leaves against the mossy brick of the structure. The sun was quite far down the sky at this time, and the clouds had piled up. In the shadow of the aqueduct I began to feel a bit cold, and regretted having only a couple of onigiri for a lunch on the go. I decided I would stop at the sweet shops (chestnuts were in season) near the entrance and have a sweet and a green tea on the way out. This would not be far in the future, because the light had begun to fail when we walked on.

When we got to the next structure I ran into a more technical problem. My old camera had begun to fail, so I’d decided to use only my phone through this trip. Now, right on the first day I found that the memory card was full. I would spend the next two evenings deleting useless photos. When you work with your phone, you don’t realize how many photos you’ve taken of the same stone. So freeing up space only takes time. (Don’t you like that summary of the structure of our universe?) But right now, with the sun going down, I could not spend the time to delete too many. I took a couple of photos of the lovely dry garden we’d reached, and then put the phone away. The memory of walking through this beautiful temple as dusk rose around us is something that I will remember without photos.

There was a barrier on the way out: a simple steel boom across a road, decorated with cast metal sparrows. That called for a photo. The Family handed me her phone so I could take a close up.

The silver pavilion

Time’s a strange fellow;
more he gives than takes
(and he takes all)
e e cummings (1952)

Ginkaku-ji is a quiet place which I liked for its quiet pond and its view of Kyoto. Over the years the number of tourists has increased, but it is still relatively less crowded. On my first visits to this temple’s gardens I could wander anywhere, but now there are designated walks. That’s fine, because the paths continue to take me to my old favourite spots. But I’m glad Ashikaga Yoshimasa never got to cover his pavilion with silver foil; that is perhaps why this temple, properly called Jishō-ji, is not as popular with tourists as the more colourful ones. “All the better for us,” I said to The Family, “as we admire the garden.”

That morning we were not exactly the first visitors there, but we were still ahead of the crowds. It was nice and sunny, and the pavilion looked pretty in the sunlight. The area near the entrance is always the most crowded because the pavilion, a little shrine to one side, and the famous sand sculpture are all here. We took our photos and moved away, leaving the place to first time visitors. The place was built as a retirement home of a shogun, and became a center of culture. This so-called Higashiyama culture shaped many aspects of the classical Japanese arts, from gardens to the tea ceremony.

The autumn colours in the garden looked wonderful in the morning’s sunlight. We paused briefly by the pond. I looked down to check for koi, but today all I could see were coins tossed in there by tourists. Is this a new trend? I don’t remember that tossing coins in here was ever a thing; and I couldn’t find any previous photo showing it. One problem with tourism is how it flattens the world. In any case, I think I got a decent photo from that place. Wabi-sabi. I’m beginning to adopt it. The Family and I both took photos of a camellia flower. I took mine when it was backlit, so it looked very odd.

The path climbs a bit, circling above the grounds. The view of Kyoto in the featured photo is from the path. While descending, the view of the moss garden, the trees and its carpet of maple leaves looked enchanting. We had planned this whole trip for views such as this. “With this kind of a breeze, I hope there are some leaves left on trees tomorrow,” I said. I need not have worried. There were leaves in plenty for us to see.

Garden of the Seven Lucky Gods: Monday Art

Shichifuku no niwa, the Garden of the Seven Lucky Gods, is the smallest garden I saw in Japan. The seven stones within the circle represent the Seven Gods of Fortune (七福神, Shichifukujin), and the two sets of stones that touch the boundary of the circle are representations of a ship which carries them. I saw this sculpture inside the Wakayama castle. This dry garden is an example of the innovative directions taken by Japanese artists when the ideals of Chinese gardens were transplanted here. The treatment of stone groups in garden in Japan is quite different from than in China.

It is said that this sculpture was created for Tokugawa Yorinobu, the tenth son of Tokugawa Ieyasu, when he was appointed daimyō of Wakayama in 1619 CE. I was surprised to read that it was created by Yorinobu’s father in law, Katō Kiyomasa. After all, he was a man who believed so strongly that a warrior’s duty was only to fight that he banned the recitation of poetry in his domain. I learnt later that I was not the only one who found this attribution strange. Others have pointed out that the Kiyomasa had died in 1611, before Yorinobu moved to Wakayama.

Whatever, the truth, I stood and admired the view of this grouping of green schist. It originally stood in the inner enclosure of the castle, and was moved here just about a century ago, in 1923. The placement of the tree over it, and its relationship with the rest of the garden is new. I thought whoever was responsible for moving the group had done a lovely job.

Sashimi set lunch

A bus from Wakayama dropped us off at Wakaura and we walked from there to the harbour. The fishing harbour is a bit of a tourist draw in warmer seasons. But in the middle of December the hotels seemed to be empty. We walked along the quay to a small lighthouse at the end of it, and spent a nice hour watching birds. The fishermen had washed their boats and nets and left them to dry. A small shop at the beginning of the harbour was drying whitebait on wire meshes. I learnt later that this would be pressed into paper thin squares of tatami iwashi, a local delicacy. One of the women at work gave us some yet-to-be-dried whitebait to taste. It was delicious.

Our appetites whetted, we walked up the road and took a set of stairs which led to a restaurant some way up the cliff overlooking the harbour. Its name translated into Wakayama Cafeteria, but even with this simple name it came highly recommended. We got a table overlooking the harbour and ordered two plates of the sashimi that you see in the featured photo. The steaming bowl of miso soup was very welcome after our walk by the sea. The sashimi was an experience: apart from the usual maguro (bluefin tuna), salmon, hotate (scallop), kanburi (winter catch of amberjack) and tai (sea bream) there was fresh whitebait in a little bowl, and a whole fresh shrimp. This was the first time I’d tried uncooked shrimp and I found its familiar flavour is sweeter as sashimi. I like Japanese pickles, so I appreciated the plate of vegetables and pickles to go with the rice. The whole thing ended with a small sweet. The freshness of the sashimi made it among the top two plates that I’ve tasted.