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We found this beam end carving at a small temple in Numazu, which lies on a bay facing the Pacific Ocean slightly southwest of the Hakone region on Mt Fuji's south side.

The right-most carved figure is a mythical creature called a shi-shi. A shi-shi is sort of a cross between the characteristics and appearances of a lion and a dog. Shi-shi statues are often seen guarding the entrances to temples. I have seen the motif used as finials on roof eaves, as a pottery pattern, carved into netsuke statuettes, and painted onto byobu folding silk screens. I believe it is also an auspicious figure used to inspire courage in young boys.

The carving of the birds and flowering branches along the flat of the beam shows typically high levels of skill and craftsmanship. The more full-depth carving of the birds and flowers below the beam are actually a cleverly disguised beam support bracket to the column under the shi-shi.

This is an example of the ubiquitous plastic food display case outside an eatery. That's right, all the food there is fake. The making of these rather exacting duplicates of real food is an artform that has made a section of Asakusa district in Tokyo renowned throughout Japan for its culinary forgeries.

Although it is a little hard to see in the picture, the signs in this display case show prices in roman numerals as used in the United States. The rather elaborate assorted meal contained in the wooden box in the middle cost 4200 yen, or about $42 U.S. dollars at the time of our visit. The food is fake....the prices are real.

This lantern scene was snapped at the rather imposing Heien-Jingu shrine that was built to celebrate Kyoto's 1100th anniversary as the capital of the emperor. It lies in the northeast section of Kyoto. We stopped to see it on our way back into town on the bus from the Ginkakuji (Silver Pavillion temple), which lies even further to the northeast.

Above and to the right of the lantern in the picture you can see a single-level bracket complex atop the column. Behind the beam and to the left of the lantern are some iron square hooks. Those hooks are used to support and hold open the black lattice doors that open by swinging upward on hinges along their top edge.

The Heien period architecture seems to me closer to its Chinese antecedents and more baroque than the later, much sparser, Shoin style of architecture. To many Westerners, the Shoin style represents the culmination and the Golden Age of Japanese architecture.

There is a bit of history and more info on the Heien Jingu shrine at: http://www.heianjingu.or.jp/english/0301.html

These pre-school kids were playing in the water in the large park outside the Kyoto Imperial Palace. As we strolled up to them, one of the little boys spotted me and cried out, "Gaijin! Gaijin!" That is the Japanese word for a foreigner. Nearby were some blankets spread on the ground with many miniscule backpacks and small pairs of shoes scattered around them. Obviously it was a field-trip out for the kids and their teachers.

We noted that the conformity of uniforms was imposed onto older students, as old as their teens, as they went trooping down the sidewalk in the mornings. My wife informed me that each different private school has its own uniform. The uniform for the public schools is a sailor's top with skirt on the girls and navy sport coat, white shirt, tie, & slacks for the boys.

Kinkakuji (Golden Pavillion) is probably one of the most photographed sites in Japan and is a standard stop for the hordes of tourists shuttling around Kyoto. I was struck when I first saw it how it looked just like the photos I'd seen of it. Not all tourist attractions share that quality. Kinkakuji was built in the hills west of Kyoto as a retreat for the emporer to escape the heat and humidity of Kyoto's summers. On the backside of the building is a small dock with a boat so the emporer could float around on the pond. The top two floors of the building are covered with gold leaf and tourists are restricted to walking on the paths around it, but are not allowed into it.

This is a building situated at Gora-Koen (koen = a park) in the Hakone area near Mt Fuji. In this photo you can see a few of the devices used in traditional Japanese architecture.

The large solid-white door at the right is called a fusuma. It is actually a lightweight wooden frame that has been covered with several layers of washi paper. Like most doors in traditional Japanese rooms, to open & close, the fusuma slides back & forth in grooves cut into the top and bottom doorframes. The small dark round device on the surface of the door is not a doorknob. Rather, it is a shallow metal (sometimes wood) depression that you insert your fingertips into when sliding the fusuma back and forth to open or close it. These shallow cup-like devices are called hikite. They are sometimes made more decorative by etching or painting a picture or pattern onto the bottom surface of the depression and/or carving or pierce-cutting the hikite rim flange that lays on the surface of the paper into shapes representing flowers, leaves, birds, or other motifs.

The large sliding door with the square grid on it just to the left of the fusuma is called a shoji. It consists of an outer frame containing a grid of interlocking narrow wooden strips called kumiko. Washi paper is then glued to the back of the kumiko. Traditionally the glue was made by mashing cooked rice to build gluten chains in the starch, then diluting the rice paste with water to make it thin enough to apply to the back edge of the kumiko with a brush of frayed bamboo. This rice glue was used because if it got smudged onto the washi paper as it was attached to the kumiko, the glue wouldn't show on the translucent skin of the paper. This particular shoji has a wooden panel kick-board at the bottom. This board precludes holes getting poked into the paper or the relatively fragile kumiko getting damaged in the area of the shoji that usually sustains damage from errant toes or crawling babies.

If the paper of a shoji does get a hole poked in it, either accidentally or from mischievious childhood pranks, it can be patched by gluing a piece of washi paper over the hole. These patches are often cut into decorative shapes like a cherry blossom or maple leaf.

Above the fusuma and shoji door can be seen smaller, more-horizontal shoji grids filling a gap between the upper door framings and the ceiling. The gap and the panels used to fill it I have heard referred to as ranma. The gap is used in hot humid summer weather to facilitate ventilation between rooms without opening the shoji, thus affording each room visual privacy as well as a bit of fresh air. To create openings in the ranma gap for airflow, some ranma slide back and forth like the shoji shown here. Other ranma have decorative pierce-cuttings or through-carvings to provide openings for the air to move through. Some ranma are made as lattices in simple or elaborate patterns.

Behind the fusuma door, at the extreme right of the photo, you can see a wood-and-paper shoji grid used like a curtain to screen the window above a sink in the adjacent room.

At the bottom of the picture, left of the shoji, is a tatami-mat lined narrow veranda called an engawa. Engawa can be covered with mats, rugs, or have bare floors, usually of wood. This engawa is rather narrow, about as wide as a hallway. Other engawa are quite a bit wider. I've seen as wide as about eight or ten feet on temple buildings. On homes, it is more typical to see engawa out to about six feet wide. Wider engawa on homes can be used as sort of an "outside room" where a family might gather on cushions placed on the floor to read, play games, have tea, or meet casually with visitors. Barely left of the shoji door in the photo you can spot reddish-brown leather house slippers I left in the wooden-floored hallway when I stepped onto the tatami mat of the engawa.

Through the window is seen the facing of an engawa on an adjacent section of the building with a rather unusual railing material. The engawa railing has a facing of cedar bark that has been peeled in sections from the tree. These sheets of cedar bark are held in place by horizontal battens of split bamboo.

This is the view looking north from the Kyoto Tower observation deck. The large dark-roofed buildings in the foreground are the Higashi-Hongonji Temple. The biggest building there is one of two that I've heard claim to be the largest all-wood-construction building in the world. The other building laying claim to the title is the Daibutsudan in nearby Nara.

This picture shows how it is typical in Japanese cities to jam and jumble together concrete housing units & apartment blocks, office buildings & other commercial properties, ancient shops alongside ultra-modern glassbox office towers, and so on. My impression is that zoning codes don't exist within the boundaries of Japanese cities.

At the bottom center of the picture you can see among the concrete multi-story buildings the brown roof of a wooden two-story building that could be a traditional shop building. The small retail shop would be set up in the front part of the bottom floor along the street. The rear part of the bottom floor might be used as a manufacturing location where the products for the front-end shop would be made or inventory stored. The upper floor would be the home of the business owner and his family.

In spite of the lack of control over building within the boundaries of Japanese cities, there must be incredibly strong legal dictates on where those boundaries are located. When leaving a Japanese city or town, you get almost none of the diminishing building density experienced passing through the suburban areas around an American city as you travel from the city to surrounding rural areas. Driving along in Japan you can be surrounded one moment by the stacked and jammed buildings of a town. Suddenly, beyond a razor-clean boundary line marking the edge of town, you suddenly find yourself surrounded by woods & bamboo thickets or the meticulously tidy miniscule fields planted in vegetables, flowers, or flooded for rice that are so typical of the Japanese rural countryside.

This torii at Miyajima is another one of the most-photographed attractions in Japan. Torii are gate-like entrances to Shinto shrines. This large one is made of tree trunks that have been sunk into the mudflat in front of the Itsukushima Shrine. When the tide is out, you can walk around the torii if you've got boots to wear in the mud.

This is a front view of the Daibutsudan in Nara, one of the buildings claiming to be the largest all-wood-construction building in the world. As with many attractions in Japan, this one was crawling with tourists. Most of them are Japanese being shuttled around in tour buses following a tour guide from site to site. Japanese people seem to be very enthusiastic about visiting the cultural and entertainment attractions within their own country. Probably due to the language barrier and relatively high prices, I saw a surprisingly small percentage of foreign visitors in Japan, even at the more famous locations like this one.

This display of pickled octopus was found among the stalls of the pedestrian shopping area that lies between Ueno train station in Tokyo and the Matsuzakaya department store a few blocks away. Within that area are stalls selling a diverse array of items including foodstuffs, housewares, clothing new & used, decorative items for your home & body, cell phone accessories, you-name-it.

There are more photos of this steet market on this page from Galen Frysinger's website.

This five-story wooden pagoda is at the shrine where Ieyasu Tokugawa is buried in Nikko. He was the first shogun and planned out before his death this shrine in the hills a couple hours northeast of Tokyo. This pagoda is rather typical of the elaborate and florid architectural style that pervades the Nikko shrine. The pagoda is not actually leaning to the side as it appears to be in my not-very-level picture.

This building has the appearance of a typical traditional ryokan inn facade.

The out-thrust bay windows, like those shown flanking the entrance door, with vertical slats to afford privacy from the gaze of passersby in the street I have heard referred to as "insect cage" windows. The rack of tied bamboo poles slanting out from the building at street level would have reinforced the privacy of the building by forcing anyone walking past the house further into the street, thus hindering even more their ability to peer into the house. In earlier times, these windows allowed someone inside the house, without leaving the house, to transact business with a vendor standing in the street. In the case of a merchant's, samurai's, or official's house, the seperation and elevation of the person inside the house above the vendor in the street would be a physical manifestation of their superior social standing over the vendor. Even today, many reinforcements of social standing are still rigorously maintained among the Japanese people.

The split bamboo shades shown in front of the upper-floor windows are called sudare (soo-DAH-ray). They offer visual privacy from the outside and block a fair amount of sunlight striking them. But they are quite permeable to the passage of breezes. Thus a room shielded by sudare can be a cool haven in the humid heat of early summer in Japan. Sudare are also sometimes used as interior space dividers between rooms or to screen off an area or corner where items are stored that you don't want visible.

At the lower right in the picture you will see one of the ubiquitous drink vending machines that seem to be found every few blocks in the cities. From the same machine you might get dispensed cans or bottles of cold water, sodas, fruit juices, electrolyte power drink, beer, tea, and coffee. Some of them also offered hot coffee and tea. I noted that sake seemed to be dispensed from seperate machines, with beer sometimes being offered from those machines as well. But the sake machines were nowhere near as common as the ones dispensing the other types of liquid refreshment.

This is a shoe rack near the front door of a temple. It is pretty common to take off your shoes when entering a temple. Finding a shoe rack is a tip-off that you should probably do so, if there aren't other visitors whose behaviour you can follow. You can tell by the number off shoes on the shelves that this temple is not very busy at the moment. The small room next to the shoe rack is the office of an attendant at the temple. Note the long red shoehorn with a loop handle hanging on the corner of the office for the convenience of visitors putting their shoes back on at the end of their visit.

The glass display case at the extreme left side of the picture might contain icons of this particular shrine donated by supplicants or maybe a display of votive or souvenir items that would be for sale to visitors to this temple.

This is an example of a sign with both Japanese and English characters on it. It happens to be a sign at the Marutamachi stop on the Kyoto subway system. It was placed on the wall across the tracks from the platform, making it easy to spot as you walk along the platform.

Because the platform has tracks on both sides of it, each typically carrying a train or subway travelling in opposite directions, the arrows on the signs show in which direction the subway will travel through this station on that particular track. Below the arrow is the name (Karasuma Oike in this case) of the next station in that direction. Conversely, the name of the station from which the train is coming is shown at the other side of the sign (Imadegawa on this sign).

Note that the comparable signs at JR train stations are typically placed directly overhead above the platform, do not have the arrow indicating direction of train travel, and often display the name of the terminus city for the line instead of the name of the next station. Even though there are route maps for the trains in all the train stations in larger cities, I highly recommend that you keep one of the easily available English-language transit route maps for your current city handy in your pocket or pack. You should be able to get one at your ryokan, a TIC office, or other tourist help location.

At busy JR station platforms in big cities like Tokyo, where many trains going to different destinations might pass through the station on the same track every few minutes, electronic signs display the departure time and destination of the next train in Japanese and English. These platforms too have tracks on both sides, usually carrying trains travelling in opposite directions. So be careful about which side of the platform your train is leaving from, since it isn't always immediately clear. I got caught a few times going in the wrong direction. When I realized my mistake, I simply got off at the next stop, crossed the platform at that station, and got on a train going in the right direction for my trip.

Part of my confusion arose from a single platform servicing trains from a given line (or several lines) but traveling the route in opposite directions. Which side of the platform you used to get on a train dictated which direction you were going. So as I mentioned, be careful to establish which side of the platform your train is leaving from to avoid having to backtrack.

This is a display of some cloths to dress Buddhist altars. We saw them at a shop specializing in hand-woven silk fabrics for religous purposes. It was located in a section of Kyoto where many shops and stores were concentrated to sell religious accessories like fabric, incense burners, home altars, statues, dishes, and other such items. On an ancient looking foot-operated loom near the front of this shop sat an equally ancient looking man weaving silk. The practiced efficiency of his movements clearly showed that he had made those gestures thousands and thousands of times. The young lady tending the shop explained that a full day of weaving by hand, as the old man was doing, yields only about an inch of fabric because the silk threads feeding the loom are so thin.

The phoenix birds seen on some of the cloths seem to be an obvious reference to the belief in reincarnation. The chrysanthemum blossoms on many of the cloths were originally a design that was reserved for the emporer, because it was the family crest (kamon). These days it is not so exclusive and seems to be frequently seen in the marketplace. My impression is that it's a symbol adopted by sellers wishing to infer a sense of sophistication for their product.

This is a special paint job that was applied to some subway cars for Kyoto's 1,200th anniversary as the capital of the emporer.

Some things to notice in this picture:

• How incredibly clean everything is. Compare this scene to subways in places like New York City. Now you can see a physical manifestation of why I feel Japan is probably the most civilized country I have ever seen or had explained to me by natives.
• The yellow metal-plate tiles set into the floor immediately in front of the waiting passengers on the platform. When a train or subway is approaching or leaving the platform, you are expected to stand behind those yellow tiles. This creates a safety buffer zone in front of those tiles between you and the subway or train cars rushing past. Not all trains or subways stop at all stations. There are express trains and subways that stop only at the larger stations and go barreling through the interim stations. Even the cars of trains or subways that do stop at your platform may be moving quite fast as they come into your stop. Staying back a bit from them is just common sense.
• The locations where there is a section of metal tiles with an additional row added, making an extra-wide metal tile strip at that point. Those show you where the doors of the train or subway will be when the train is stopped at the station.
• It must not be rush hour based on two facts:
  1. The platform is not jam-packed with people. I mean shoulder-to-shoulder masses of people young and old scurrying away toward the exits or others scrambling hard, trying to make headway against the outrushing mass of humanity, so they can get aboard the car before the doors slide shut and it goes rushing out of the station.
  2. The people on the platform and in the car are rather casually dressed. At rush hour train and subway platforms are mobbed with men and women in business attire carrying briefcases typically more formal than the one held by the man shown.

These tea packages were at a street stall specializing in tea. The 1,050 yen for 200 grams price shown equates to about $20-$25 US dollars per pound of tea at the time we were in Japan. I found the Japanese to be copious tea consumers, especially of green tea. Consequently, tea raising becomes a major industry in whichever regions of the country have the proper soil & climate to support growing it. There were available in the tea shops and stalls a huge spectrum of tea qualities, with prices sometimes reaching astronomical heights as the quality or rarity of the tea increased.

In Europe it's wine......in Japan it's tea.