my day in pictures

Yesterday, my friend wanted to take me to an art gallery in the mountains. The artist, Yumeji Takehisa (1884-1934) was from Kyoto and was obsessed with drawing geisha. There were some really good prints. I was actually really amazed at the level of detail he captured in some of the woodcuts -- printing textures on textures, so that parts actually looked 3D. But his style was just as much Art Nouveau as it was authentic Japanese. Anyway, his style is called "Yumeji Style of Beautiful Women".

This one is unusual for him in that it's an indoor scene. Most of his pictures either have no background or are set outside in the park and streets of Gion.

Anyway, after the museum we kind of got lost and, while walking in the extremely narrow streets of the little town, I discovered this footbath! It was basically just a trough next to the road, where a small hotspring kept pumping lukewarm water. Nice to relax my feet -- especially after the geta ruined my toes when i wore the yukata.

The town is basically a hotspring town, it's very rural and has been around for centuries. But apparently it gets so much snow in the winter that no one comes or goes. While we sat with our feet in the water, Miyuki, my language buddy, started talking to the people sitting next to us. They told her that she should take me to the old Edo Period houses. The Edo period was the Samurai Period, about 1500-1890-ish.

The houses were from the early 1600s, and were village houses. One was where the Landholder lived, the other was their peasants' house and the last was an independent farmer's house. Very interesting.
This is the inside. I thought that there was a simplistic, zen beauty to everything. The Master's house had a silk-worm den, where they made high-quality cloth for kimonos. The den was basically the only fully enclosed space in the house and hovered in the middle, so that you had to climb up with a ladder. A slave slept in there with the worms and made sure to put them back on their hammock if they fell down. The peasants did all the weaving, and created the tatami for the flooring.

On the other side of the houses, while sitting in the rooms with the large sliding doors open, this is the view. The rice fields are becoming gold, a sign that autumn is coming and that they will be harvested soon. Marco Polo wrote that Japan was a land of gold, because when he arrived it was fall and all the rice paddies were shining the colour of gold. And seeing those houses I think I understand, the thatch-roofs also shone gold when I stepped out of the dark interior into the sun.