Part deux begins now:-

I’m back again, and with more trees. Last time I showed you quite a few tree photos, and the places we went and trees we saw were wonderful, but I have to say that the next destination turned out to be one of the best displays yet. We had tried to find this place once before, but didn’t manage to find it. We caught a train out to a town called Kameoka, and then we were supposed to catch a bus out to the spot where the trees were, but there was no bus for a very long time, and when we tried to walk out there, well, we couldn’t find it. In fact, this whole shemozzle led us to finding the Hozugawa boat ride, so, in fact, it turned out to be quite fortuitous. We have since had two rides down the Hozugawa and enjoyed every minute.

BCV, obviously

Now, back to the current story, our visit to the Yawaragi no michi area (finally). This time we went via car, and we took our friends Lilia and Yuval with us. Lilia had suggested we take a hanami journey somewhere together, but everywhere I suggested she had been to in the recent past (Lilia writes a public blog and so is always looking for something new to write about). Finally I remembered our not so successful search for this blossom walk, and luckily she hadn’t been there before.

It was about an hours drive there, and I discovered that the distance between the train station and the walk was a long way – a very long way – so not surprising we didn’t find it. Unsurprisingly, there were a lot of people there, but the area was large enough that it didn’t seem too crowded. The local council has obviously gradually expanded the tree plantings, and we could see that there were some fairly recent plantings along the river. Apparently there are about 1,500 trees and the walk along the riverside extends for about 1km.

We took some picnic provisions with us and enjoyed sitting under a very large tree while partaking our repast. There were, in fact, many spots to sit and enjoy this amazing place, and many families, couples and friends were doing just that. It was a glorious, sunny day, not overly warm, but pleasant for walking. While we were there we saw some interesting sights, including a paraglider over the hills, a woman who had brought her dog and a chair on which she had placed the dog for photographs under the sakura (!), and a man who had brought a little person made from cardboard, who he was also photographing under the sakura…

Where we ate our lunch

The cardboard person strolling

All in all a wonderful journey, in beautiful surroundings, with good friends and food and some rather interesting people. On top of all this, there was no entry fee only a parking fee of ¥500 (although I think they could ask for donations towards upkeep and improvement of facilities – there was only one western style toilet) and the cost of petrol to get there.

Talking about interesting sights, during the hanami time we had a dirigible flying over our house for a few days. We first noticed the sound of a flying vehicle, but not the usual helicopter sound (we have many, many helicopters flying around our area, which we assume are mostly for tourists). It also didn’t sound like a light plane, so we just had to check what it was, and there above our house was an Asahi advertising blimp. With so many tourists in Kyoto for hanami, it is obviously worth the cost. Funnily enough, on the bottom of the blimp it said, in English, “Look Up Japan”, which you can only see if you are already looking up…

The last place we visited during this period was at the suggestion of Lilia, to a shrine that is very near Kyoto University, where she recently completed her doctorate. It is called Yoshida Jinja and was founded in 859CE by the Fujiwara clan, which the Encyclopaedia Britannica describes as a “dynastic family that, by shrewd intermarriage and diplomacy, dominated the Japanese imperial government from the 9th to the 12th century”. Further, it states that “The power and authority of the Fujiwara family rested not on military prowess but on political strategy and on the family’s special relationship to the imperial family, which it carefully cultivated and exploited. This relationship stemmed from the Fujiwara policy of maintaining attachment to the imperial family through the marriage of Fujiwara daughters to emperors. It meant that the Fujiwara daughters were empresses, that their grandsons and nephews were emperors, and that members of their family, including its lesser branches, received all the patronage. Thus, the Fujiwara clan chieftain, whether he held office or not, could manipulate the reins of government.” Interesting.

Anyway, this shrine was very important to the emperors – essentially it was the guardian shrine for the Heian-kyo (present day Kyoto) Palace. It came to be called Yoshida Jinja in reference to a new denomination of Shinto created by the Head Priest of the shrine, Yoshida Kanetomo, some time during the late 1400s. Yoshida Shinto no longer exists as a separate denomination, mainly because it essentially took over as the Shinto religion. Basically, by the time he became head priest Buddhism and Shintoism had become effectively intermingled and he was concerned that Shinto was the original Japanese religion, with Buddhism having been imported from China. So he set about re-establishing Shinto as a separate religion from Buddhism, obviously quite successfully.

The shrine is located on one of the hills to the east of Kyoto (where we are also located, just a little further south from there), and within the grounds there are many smaller sub-shrines. The majority of the land, however, is wooded with paths winding through the trees, which makes it a nice place to walk. The reason Lilia mentioned it is because at the back of the shrine land there is a sub-shrine with a number of torii gates lining the walk to the shrine. In the gaps between these gates there are blossom trees, which makes for a very pretty walk and nice photos, when they are in bloom. Unfortunately, by the time we got there, most of the blossom had gone. Still, like I said a nice walk, with good views of Kyoto and the blimp, which had clearly followed us!

One thing I should mention from our visit to the shrine is the sighting of a bride and groom prior to their wedding ceremony. I think I have mentioned before that Shinto takes care of the ‘life’ things, such as marriage and children blessings, house blessings etc, while Buddhism takes care of the afterlife things, ie funerals and cemeteries, etc. For the traditional parts of the marriage ceremonies, the brides and grooms wear traditional clothing, with most brides choosing to wear a white kimono and interesting white headwear, which I thought you might like to see. I have used a photo from the electronic oracle, as the bride we saw had yet to put it on, though I saw it on a bench ready for the bride to don.

Waiting around

The bottom two photos show a bride and groom during the proceedings and a bride in close up.

Before I sign off, I should mention that our furry grandchildren are two weeks old today 😊. Their ears have all unfurled and their eyes are fully open, so we are making sure to let them see us, as much as is possible since they are spending most of their time drinking and sleeping. Tahlia is back to her supermodel shape (slim with very long legs), and she is doing a great job of looking after them. Unfortunately all of this means it is very hard to get any photos of them.

That’s all for now

Cheers!

Some strange people, or is it blossom sickness?

A couple of cosplay girls being photographed

Even the pavers have blossom on them

Not sure if these are two separate birds, or just the one moving around so that it is photographed a lot

This cafe was up near the summit of the Yoshida shrine. Obviously popular, because there was a queue to get in. The bottom photo shows an old concrete table and bench there.

Lichen on  a cherry tree.

Ending on a non-blossom note, to prepare you for next time…

Guess what? It’s tree time again!

Hello and welcome to part one of a two part posting in which you will see more voluptuously voyeuristic tree photos than you thought possible in two sittings. Theoretically, all of this should be in only one post but there are so many fabulous photos, that I can’t bring myself to reduce them down that much. Sitting in the folder for this post are around 300 photos of trees! Now, don’t panic, I am not going to put in anywhere near that many, and the difficult task of culling is yet to come for me, but at least it is a rather pleasurable difficulty…

The truth about hanami…

Spring has well and truly sprung here and the weather is gradually improving, with days in the 20s now dominating the weather. The warmest day we have had this year, so far, was 27C – glorious. I wore a t-shirt and sandals! It felt like real freedom; lighter clothing, my feet un-socked (can I use that as a term?) and no cold wind. The puffs are all put away. I have heard some people call this time ‘the greening’, and it does seem an apt term to me. Our garden is turning green again, with all our plants now sprouting. We have even had the first flowers from one of our irises, a gorgeous yellow bearded iris.

Speaking of our garden, we have had to do a little re-arranging, as we found some plants just didn’t like where we initially put them. We have also had to replace some plants which just haven’t coped with the last two winters – too cold then too much snow. Unfortunately one of these was the purple princess flower bush, which I loved. I couldn’t find a suitable endemic plant that was purple to replace it, so we decided to replace it with a camellia which we know can survive the winters here.

We found the geisha plants weren’t overly happy during winter too and tended to die back completely, so we have put two of the three into pots and replaced them with a couple of wisteria plants. We also had to move the dogwood tree and have replaced it with a white magnolia. Hopefully these changes will mean a more settled garden which can grow happily. Fingers crossed.

In terms of natural phenomena, we have also had at least four earthquakes near us in the last two weeks, which is a little unusual. While there are earthquakes in Japan basically every day, we don’t get too many around us. They haven’t been very strong, more in the medium magnitude 3 – 5 range at the epicentre, which translated to about magnitude 1 – 3 for us. Interestingly, I have had to add a new descriptor to my earthquake scale – the Double Hit. Two of the four recent earthquakes fall into this category. We have never experienced this type of quake before. The first time we felt this we were watching tv; we felt the slight movement and heard the house creak, and thought ‘good, that was not so bad’, then a couple of seconds later it happened again. Somewhat unnerving.

The second time this type of quake happened, Craig was at gym and I was at home doing my stretching and ballet routine. The first hit was very similar to the previous one – slight movement, house creaked – I thought, ok, good, not too bad. Then about four seconds later I heard the second one coming. This time it was stronger than the first hit – a rattler – enough to get me off the floor and the kids to look concerned. Craig said he felt it at the gym, too. Of the other two, the first was the strongest of them all and woke me up, at around 11:30 pm. It was a swayer, and lasted for a while. Yes, I was rocked awake. Strangely, even though it only felt like it was swaying, the shoji were rattling.

In terms of much more pleasant natural phenomena, we had a few outings specifically to view the blossom (hanami, as it is known here) during this period. We made a return visit to Daigoji, as planned, and we walked into town, which takes us along many blossom tree lined roads, and we returned via the Chishakuin cemetery, where there are some lovely trees. The other outings will be covered in the next post.

Near our home

As expected, there were many more people visiting Daigoji, but it was worth going there. The temple grounds are so vast that even though there were hundreds of people, we could still get some photos without people in them, although most of those were taken over their heads (luckily we are relatively tall here, yes, even me). It wasn’t quite peak time, with some trees still to open, but there were plenty that were and it was a beautiful sunny day. Not much more to say really, so here is a selection of the photos:

On the day we walked into town, it was very grey on the way in and it was a little cooler, but it was still a very pleasant walk. There are so many cherry trees planted in and around Kyoto, that you can pretty much walk in any direction and you will find blossom at this time of year. It really is a wonderful thing, which makes any walk into a lovely hanami experience.

To finish this post off, I have an update on our newest family member, Tahlia. After bringing her inside and ensuring she was disease free, we started letting her integrate into the family a bit more, which she was very keen to do (even if the other kids were not quite so keen). At first we let the others go out into the dining room, and Tahlia was a little aloof at first. I would feed her out there, to ensure Ziggy couldn’t steal any of her food (he likes to do that…). As she was pregnant, I changed her diet to a kitten food based diet, as recommended on the internet because kitten food is higher in calories, which a pregnant cat needs.

After about a week, she decided that she should come out into our area – so I would give her breakfast in the dining room, then she would join us after. At night, I would take her food out to the dining room, and she would follow me out there. We didn’t want her to sleep in our area, because even though she was there all day, the other kids were still adjusting to her presence (if you know what I mean).

During this time, Tahlia became increasingly affectionate with us, and she just loved lying on the heated floor at night. Sometimes she would lie right in front of me, so I could rub her belly. Gradually her belly grew, until she looked like a furry football with four legs.

We made a ‘birthing box’ for her, out of a cardboard box. I followed directions from the internet, lining it with plastic, and using cat toilet pads for padding and to capture fluids from birthing and the kittens’ toilet needs. These pads are made to be used either inside litter trays or there are trays especially made where you put the pads on drawers which are under a perforated tray. Tahlia basically ignored the box up until she was nearly two months pregnant. We were worried she would find somewhere else rather less suitable.

One morning I discovered that she had been in the box and had mostly pulled all the linings apart. So, I decided to remove the plastic lining, as it was this that she had really shredded. I kept the padding at the bottom and rearranged the toilet pads, to make them neater. The, on the morning of the 12^th of April, day 64 of her pregnancy, I went out to the dining room to find her in the box, all the layers rearranged by her to form a sort of nest in the corner, and she was panting. I got down to see how she was and at that moment she gave birth to her first kitten! She started cleaning it, and it started squeaking (relief).

After this, over the next few hours, she gave birth to three more bundles of fur. Mother and babies were fine, and the anxious grandmamar (me) was able to relax a little. Having had her babies, she has become much less affectionate, and is now in aggressively protective mummy mode, so we are hassling her as little as possible, and our plans to try to remove the top layer of the toilet pads has completely gone out the window. Our friend who feeds some of the cat colonies, who we helped to move cats and paraphernalia to the house she bought for the cats, has suggested we wait and let Tahlia make the first move in terms of cleaning out the box. This has also taken a weight off our minds. The thing is, all the information on the internet is really aimed at people whose pet cat is having kittens, not one you have recently trapped and brought inside from the streets.

So, we are grandparents 😊, and we are learning. The photos I have of her and the kittens were taken from a distance, and then edited so that more can be seen. I’m not even sure if they all have tails, yet. One thing, none of them look like their mum, that I can see. The father is a ginger and white, fully tailed cat.

That’s all for now. The next post will be “The trees, part deux”.

Cheers!

Hurrah!

Queuing for a restaurant

I wonder if Kitchen Aid was paid for this image…?

Normal Pocky on the left and the new tasty ones on the right… 

for Steven

Um, what is Tonteki?

These ducks may look like normal ducks, but they are the ones that walk instead of swimming!!! (they are walking on the bottom…)

There are some amazing street and mall decorations

Yes, I do like Tanuki

Also, turtles