Japan: Explorations Down South

My calligraphy teacher is a serious badass. He's won tons of "best in show" awards in our region and has shown his calligraphy in museums in Tokyo. Usually, he teaches my friend and I each week, but today when I walked into our little classroom, I saw framed calligraphy pieces strewn all around the room, with a stack of loose papers by his side. He wanted to show us many of his own works. All of the thick pieces of paper had haikus he had drawn on them, and he probably went through 15 different ones, showing us each character and describing its meaning. They were all so...elegant. They bore only a few words, but carried so much meaning with them. Afterward, he asked us which our favorite was. I knew exactly what mine was, and when I told him, he happened to have a couple of signed "practice" versions in his stack that we got to keep! To me, the haiku represents the fragile life of something that at once was beautiful, but eventually meets its own end, falling back to earth.
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This is the haiku, first in Japanese and then the translation:

さくらさくら

さくさくら 

ちるさくら

Cherry Blossoms, Cherry Blossoms

Blooming Cherry Blossoms

Falling Cherry Blossoms

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And now, the last installment of pictures from the trip I took in January with one of my best friends. We went to Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara, Kobe, and Osaka for about two weeks. I live roughly eight hours by bus from Tokyo, and about twice that from all those other places we went. It was really fun and definitely made me appreciate Japan in even more ways. Enjoy the pictures! I am off to Thailand, Cambodia, and Malaysia next week, so expect something new when I get back. Until then!

Cameras: Nikon FM2, Nikon FM10
Film: Portra 400, Ilford Delta 3200


Previous: Kansai Trip, Pt. 1, Kansai Trip, Pt. 2

There are tons of awesome staircases in Japan.



This was when we went to see Justice in Osaka on our last night. Amazingly fun!



The friend I traveled with has the initials, "MK." Well, so did every taxi in Kyoto. It was like his kingdom. ...Of taxis.



Kyoto's International Manga Museum. It was FULL of every kind of manga and comic book you could imagine. And even more filled with heaps of people, of all ages, sitting around and reading comic books from the shelves, sitting on staircases, chairs, carpets, anywhere.





This is my friend, Michael's first time eating natto, which are fermented soybeans. They are pretty notorious in Japan for being the kind of food you either hate or love. It smells like a mixture of feet and blue cheese and the consistency is really gooey, as you can see.

This deer only had one eye.

This is Kengo. He was situated in the bunk beneath mine at one of our hostels, and while I'm sitting on my bunk, I hear my friend Michael casually ask him, "So, what's your name?" And from there we all chatted for awhile and went out together for the next couple nights. He was a cool guy.









-m :)

Time to Be Fearless

These days, it seems like everyone has some sort of blog. And if not, then they almost assuredly have a Facebook. Each of these things give people a medium to do something very important: think, and post those thoughts.

But these mediums are not perfect.
They're censored, often public, and not always great places to discuss personal ideas. So then what happens to these non-conforming thoughts? Because certainly, people think up an almost absurd amount of things every day. But when they're not recorded, they just get lost.

For almost a couple years, I've been writing down anything that feels important or moving, in a notepad on my phone. And it has probably been one of the best experiences of my life. I went to a concert about a year ago and I lost my phone, where all the notes were kept. And it didn't bother me that I'd lost my iPhone. The thing that really shook me was that I'd lost my collection of thoughts. Luckily, when I bought a new phone, my old notes had been backed up and re-added, so everything was saved. But really, my point is that if everyone chronicled their thoughts, if people didn't wait to get home to write about their day, if they didn't censor themselves the way they do in public spaces, then we could all come up with some pretty revolutionary ideas and learn huge amounts about ourself and the world. And this is not to say that I'm cooking up an intellectual response to the Communist Manifesto. Most of my "thoughts" probably don't seem life changing. To be honest, I'm probably pretty average. But I give myself room to grow and analyze and understand by keeping a diary, not of my day, but of my brain. The little pieces that begin to morph together reveal so much to me about myself, the people I interact with, and especially, the world I live in. I'd love for other people to do this, too. If you don't have a notepad on your phone, then just carry around a small notepad. It's simple, but it's worth it. Let me know if you start. It'd probably make my day.

Now, on an unrelated note, here is the second installment of pictures from my recent trip to the Kansai region of Japan (which is much more Southern than where I live). The places we explored were...incredible. Temples so large that they made people look like ants, wild deer and monkeys roaming streets and mountain trails, greens and blues and browns like they only exist in Crayola boxes. These places are called Kyoto and Nara. Enjoy.

Camera: Nikon FM10
Film: Portra 400

Previous: Kansai Trip, Pt. 1