Japan temple tours
The 88 Temple Pilgrimage (八十八ヶ所巡り hachijūhakkasho-meguri) tour is done on the island of Shikoku in Japan. It is part of a craze (most popular among the elderly) for dressing in traditional garb, carrying a long, Gandalfian staff and visiting temples. It’s an amusing phenomenon and reveals a lot about Japanese society.
The people who participate dutifully wear the costumes and hold the staffs, but rarely do much hiking, especially in downtown Kyoto where this photograph was taken. They are worn as uniforms by elderly people in their dozens as they pile out of air-conditioned tour buses literally 50m from temple entrances.
The point of the pilgrimage - the hardship, the sacrifice and the devotion - is gone, but the tropes remain. It reminds me of the novel ‘White Noise’ by Don DeLillo which satirically depicts a world in which there exist more cyphers and simulacra (copies for which the originals no longer exist) than originals.
It concerns a man who studies Hitler’s image, brand and trappings, but has little knowledge of the man and his actions. In the novel, the focus on style over substance is supposed to be a shocking indictment of the way late-capitalist societies could end up. Japan is a pre-echo of the future of the west.
Want to know what happens when your national debt exceeds any other nation? Look over here. Want to know what happens when you have more elderly people than youngsters and your population starts to shrink? Turn your attention to the Land of the Rising Retirement Age.
If you want to be a “sarariman” you need to wear a jet black suit, a white shirt and dye your hair black. You can waste time in the middle of the day so that you’re seen to be working in the evening when your boss walks past. You don’t have to excel, you just have to wear a black suit and turn up. Better to blend in than stand out.
Yakuza don’t have tattoos of dolphins on their ankles, but a girl with one banned from onsen, banned from working for Osaka City and generally judged. Nobody can logically believe she is a gangster, but tattoos must be given pariah status, because societies can’t deal with anything much more complicated than black and white. The uniform and the role are one and the same. The concept of surface and substance are rarely differentiated.
Things that would be treated as shallow or substance-less to the point of sarcasm in western societies pass by without a raise of an eyebrow in Japan. English teachers who work for Japanese “English conversation businesses” are expected to wear a tie, keep their eyes more or less open, have short hair and suppress all signs of individuality. 90% of a conversation school’s time and energy is given over to making sure recent graduates from Australian/American universities look the part. Very little time is devoted to training them to be teachers. Looking the part is enough.
In that sense these “pilgrimage tours” are a lot like Christmas in England: the ritual is more important than the myth started it.
I once asked a group of giggling pensioners why they needed the huge, gnarled staffs to get through the car park. “We’re pilgrims,” they answered.
Parallax scrolling and “that Leica 3D effect”
One of the best ways to enjoy the vibe of Kyoto Station is from its tall escalators. It’s almost impossible to take a bad video from any one of them. As signs, lights, platforms and girders scroll past in parallax they remind me of the 2D video games of my youth. I remember how the streets, and docks of Final Fight or the forests of a thousand ninja games used to scroll past quickly, with each layer of the background scrolling slightly slower than the last to create the illusion of depth.
Parallax scrolling in movies and games has got an majesty and artificiality about it that I love. I think it’s one of the most beautiful things in art. I hope to see more directors incorporating it into 3D, instead of having things “jump out of the screen” at me.
Not much in Kyoto Station seems incidental. Everything has been carefully thought out to tantalise, surprise and delight you. The view from each escalator is different, but each has something epic about it. Their gentle movement gives you video that resembles a carefully-orchestrated dolly or crane shot at a fraction of the cost.
In photography the effect is harder to replicate. One of the best ways I’ve found to do so is to open my lens up to its widest aperture - in this case f1.4 on a 35mm Fujinon lens attached to a Fuji X-Pro 1 - use our good friend bokeh to create distinct layers in an image.
One of the easiest ways to create the sense of layering it to put your subject in front of a backdrop that stretches back a long way. Corridors, tunnels, roads and the like are prime locations for portraits. With the right lens choice, creativity and post-processing you can make your model pop off the screen/page and give them a 3D-like quality.
This is a quality that Leica lovers often eulogize about and it is truly a glorious thing to behold. Studying Leica M9 images can give you an idea how to stage and process shots that have a similar quality on other cameras.
One of the things that makes subjects ‘pop’ in Leica images is the short depth of field. Others, however, include choice of subject, choice of backdrop, deep blacks, strong contrast and judicious (selective) sharpening.
A little backlighting can also work wonders as it creates subtle halo around your model, defining the outline and further separating the model from the background, which is ideally a long way away and studded with lights.
If you get the combination right something magic happens. The photo immediately stands out from the others in the shoot. Finding one of those shots on my MacBook after a shoot is a joy and one of the many reasons I love what I do.
Incidentally, this photo is not one of the best examples of what I’m talking about. It just got me thinking…
Kyoto Station, Japan
Art that is hard to pin down tends to live longer. This is a truism I try to bear in mind when I am illustrating, taking photos or writing a new 1.G.K song. However, sometimes a sentiment like that is not concrete enough, some days I need something more substantial.
At times like that, I think about Kyoto Station.
Kyoto Station is one of the most remarkable architectural marvels I have ever wandered through. It is brilliantly irregular and its character seems to change as you move through it. The west side, that you can see in this photo, includes a staircase that leads diagonally upwards alongside a department store.
Everything about the structure here is deliberately asymmetrical. Everything is off-kilter. There are few places for the eye to rest. Instead your eyes dart about trying, and probably failing, to categorise what you’re seeing.
As you climb the stairs they are reflected in the wall beside you, the roof disappears from above you and suddenly you find yourself outside, in a sky garden with a panoramic view of Kyoto Tower, Nishi Honganji, Higashi Honganji and the mountains that enclose the city. As you look back into the station building, the odd curve of the roof is reflected in the wall and seems to form a pair of giant, metallic wings soaring toward Kyoto Tower. Suddenly that odd shape seems to make sense.
From here you can make your way down to the central entrance. As you descend the escalators, signs and giant, almost-circular, Super Mario-esque platforms scroll in parallax. The space is too expansive, the roof shape too irregular and the giant yellow helipads too purposeless to allow you to grok the view before the end of the ride. Before you know it you’re on the ground floor looking at Kyoto Tower from beneath the arched entrance. Inside the “walls” of the arches are more of these UFO-shaped oddities, dotted with landing lights.
The opposite side of the building, to the east, that leads to the Granvia Hotel is utterly different in character again and feels more like the interior of a monolithic alien ship. It seems to reconfigure itself the further you walk. Sound reverberates around the cavernous space. You feel like one of the crew of the Prometheus exploring an ancient alien structure, trying to find some logic or purpose to the layout that will give you an insight into how minds operated in a different age and in another part of the universe.
One moment you are traveling up a moving walkway in a building, the next the walls vanish and you appear to be standing on a giant viewing deck giving you a view to the north and south that stretches up to the sky. The contrast between the sense of interior and the sudden revelation of almost infinite distance is bewildering and breathtaking in a way that no other structure in Kyoto can replicate. The reveal is akin to a magician whipping away a red, velvet handkerchief. It’s an architectural prestige moment.
Before you know it you’re back inside and you’re in a courtyard. The roof has gone, but a sci-fi tunnel stretches diagonally across the sky. On its underside are more of those lights that seem to have guided it when it landed here. In the courtyard are a mystifying number of light sources. Tiny bulbs twinkle and strobe almost imperceptibly on a dazzling gazebo covered with fairy lights. Although you feel like you’ve climbed as high as you can, an long escalator leads diagonally up and back above the way you came. It leads up to the skywalk.
Walking along the ground level gives you one impression of the station, but walking back through the skywalk, that you can see running along the roof in this shot, gives you an utterly different and equally breathtaking view of the building and the city’s skyline. Most impressively it gives you an unobstructed view from east to west along a narrow, girdered tunnel. As you reach the top of the escalator all you can see are long and straight girders drawing your eye to a point about 300 m into the distance. It is shockingly uniform and free of distraction. It is the polar opposite of the vast and befuddling confusion of elements that jostle for your attention on the ground below. What you can’t see from this point is that a series of viewing decks have been built into the right of the tunnel where young Japanese couples with nowhere else to go hold each other tight and look into the horizon.
Kyoto Station is the kind of building/creative act that is complex and irregular to encourage repeat viewings. The harder art is to pin down, the more mysteries it contains, the longer it will live. This is the reason I usually reject my first idea when I am creating something; the first thing to pop into your head tends to be cliche. The more you struggle with that idea and do what doesn’t come as second nature, the more likely you are to find something worthwhile. The hard part is to identify the line that separates “inexplicable but charming” from “obtuse and irritating”. For me, Kyoto Station gets it very right.
Outer Peace and Apple Scrumping
I wonder what goes through other people’s minds when they see street photography. I see hundreds of little vignettes like this one out and about every day. Some I manage to photograph. Some I fail to save from slipping through my fingers and into the voracious, sarlacc-like maw of time. Either way, they always get me thinking.
On a bright and breezy May 19 2012, I walked to a nearby “Bux” and got to started on some design work. Like a cheeky apple scrumper, I like to purloin bite-sized chunks of my surroundings from time to time with my camera. My conscience remains guilt-free as long as I scrump what I need to survive, but never so much as to upset the balance.
This time as I looked into the hessian sack and examined the spoils of my escapade, it struck me that there was something very peaceful about the shot.
While I sit under the tree from which I yoink those golden, delicious goodies, I think about life, the universe, mortality, society. The usual. I have been thinking about the deaths of myself and my loved ones on a daily basis for so long now that I forget it makes some people feel an attack of the jibblies coming on.
It makes me feel insanely lucky and reminds me that my time is short. I make it a habit to ask myself how much I’d miss a comfortable little spot like this if I were in a trench, pinned down by whining bullets from enemy guns, as my grandfather was. Cold, wet, hungry and yearning for one night of comfort at home with my family and a log fire. Nary an apple in sight. It keeps me appreciative and keeps my priorities straight.
Back in the pampered, high-tech 21st century I live in, I was illustrating on one of the many iDevices I carry around with me. I wondered how illustrators and graphic designers of even just a few years ago would feel if I gave them a computer thinner than a book on which they could do vector design work that used to require a supercomputer.
I knew I had to get to the gym and back home before 4:00 p.m. to start preparations for tonight’s shoot at KBS Hall, where I have been commissioned to photograph a dance event. I was listening to The Bugle podcast and realised, not for the first time, that I will look back at these as the happiest days of my life.
I have had that sensation enough times to know that I must be one of the most fortunate humans who has ever walked the surface of the earth. I must have it better than the kings and emperors of any generation past. My friend’s friend’s newborn baby was diagnosed with cerebral palsy days ago. He has a pure and heart-warming smile. He will require care for the rest of his life.
My poor mum suffers with her mobility and can’t get up her stairs without the help of a stairlift. 40% of humans who were ever born did not make it past their first birthdays. The odds against the comforts I enjoy must be so high that the story will seem suspicious to future generations. *crunch crunch burp*
When the survivors are fighting for the last drops of clean “shui” and “yo”, they will probably tell tales of how good it used to be for the lucky ones back in 2012 :) After the dawn of the internet and before the resources ran out, there was a hell of a party.
I am grateful everyday that I was born in a place and at a time when I wasn’t sold into slavery, persecuted and oppressed, drafted into a war or crippled by poverty. Only a tiny percentage of the humans ever born made it into this self-rowing lifeboat, and we did so thanks to the efforts of our ancestors, a heaped scoop of luck and developing world blisters. All we’ve got to do is lie back, pick the core clean and marvel at how we beat the system.
Here’s hoping we all appreciate the odds against our insanely high quality of life and can maybe even do something to earn it. In the meantime, I’ll scatter my pips to the wind and wonder if one of them will take. Perhaps an apple tree will spring forth some day?
That’s what occurs to me when I see this image.
How about you?
窓に映り込んだ自分の姿
Self-portrait in store window (best viewed on retina display:P)
鴨川沿い散歩
A woman in kimono holding a parasol taking a stroll along Kyoto’s Kamogawa River in the spring.
Aoi Matsuri takes place in Kyoto every May. Aoi Matsuri (葵祭) is one of the three main annual festivals held in Kyoto, Japan, the other two being the Festival of the Ages and Gion Festival. It’s often called Hollyhock festival although “aoi” is not hollyhock, nor are they related.
Aoi (葵) doesn’t have an English name, but the Latin name is Asarum caulescens. It’s a species of wild ginger. The connection with Hollyhock came about because one of the kanji characters was related, so someone assumed the plants were. The mistake just stuck.
Mise en abyme
伏見稲荷大社
Ninenzaka, Kyoto, Japan 二年坂・京都 (Taken with instagram)
Koi carp doing an impression of the Of Rice and Zen logo
