Japan

Today, Matt Sarah and I wandered around Kyoto. Our first drop was Takashima market. There seem to be an infinite number of stalls with food and sundries of all sorts.

We then went off to two print shops. The first one was disappointing, but in the second one we spent 2 1/2 hours looking over prints. It was a wild success. A good part of the success was my request to see an artist three of whose prints I have: Ryohei Tanaka. The store kept finding more and more hidden stashes of his prints, and I found a huge stash in their upstairs room. It turns out they had a special relationship with the artist and even have some of his advanced prints.

Matt bought himself a print.

After many rounds of discussion, I ended up buying Matt a triptych. “Triptych: the Genpei War was a civil war between the Taira and Minamoto clans (aka the Heike and Genji, depending on how you read the characters) that signaled the end of the Heian period, the beginning of the Kamakura shogunate, and perhaps most importantly, the ascent of the bushi (warrior) caste over the aristocrats that previously dominated politics. It was famously fictionalized in The Tale of the Heike, an anonymous epic poem compiled sometime before 1330.”

He bought a tale of Genji print.

“Genji print: Hikaru Genji (the "Shining Prince," for his beauty) was the son of the Kiritsubo Consort, who despite her comparatively lower social stature was the most beloved of the emperor's consorts. Because of the impropriety of the emperor spending so much time with a "lower" consort, she's the victim of harassment by others to the degree that she wastes away and dies when Genji is 3 years old. Genji spends the rest of his life trying to fill the void left by his mother's death by pursuing romantic relationships with women that resemble his mother (how Freudian!). This void is never truly filled, instead leaving him regularly contemplating the impermanence of things.”

Matt and Sarah have yet to decide on their final purchases.

We had a lovely walk to the koto craft museum. It was a great exhibit on how various crafts in Kyoto are made from lacquerware to wooden buckets, to tassels to Kimono.

Dinner. Giblets Nabe Pot Kamehachi. Known for their horse sashimi. We had the horse sashimi, hot pot, hot pot repurposed with noodle’s and excellent panna cota and yuzu sorbet.

Then Off to our local bar to meet up with Uraka and Akira. Uraka wore a denim kimono. .Les mer