Deep Kyoto

good places - good people

The Photographs of Ken Rodgers

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Did you spot the spider?

This is the third in an occasional series of profiles of Kyoto-based photographers. Each photographer chooses five of their favorite pictures from around Kyoto and tells us a little about what those pictures mean to them. Previously, we have featured Kyoto Journal‘s founder editor John Einarsen and associate editor Stewart Wachs. This time it’s the turn of KJ’s managing editor Ken Rodgers. Ken says…

Being invited to follow two superbly accomplished photographers, John Einarsen and Stewart Wachs, is quite a challenge. (Thanks, Michael!) Untrained in the darkroom arts, I hardly envisage myself as even a hobby shutterbug — but somehow, since starting to upload digital photos to iPhoto in 2005, I have accumulated over 16,000 images. Occasionally I get lucky, and fluke a shot that’s focused in the right places and reasonably composed (cropping sometimes helps…) [Read more…]

The Photographs of Stewart Wachs

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This is the second in an occasional series of profiles of Kyoto-based photographers. Each photographer will choose five of their favorite pictures from around Kyoto and tell us a little about what those pictures mean to them. Last  week we featured Kyoto Journal‘s founder editor John Einarsen. This week’s photographer is KJ‘s associate editor Stewart Wachs. Stewart says…

Photography is my way of slowing down enough to utterly forget myself. When this occurs, pictures seem to offer themselves — a landscape, a building, a window or door, a face, a creature, a sky or a stone; anything imbued with spirit can beckon the lens and trigger my finger on the shutter. The photos that I take pale by comparison.

Back around ‘93, while my wife and I sat talking with Japanese friends in their rural Kyoto home, our daughter was playing outside. The sun was starting to set when all at once three silhouettes appeared on the shoji playing rock-scissors-paper, jan-ken-pon. That’s our girl in the middle.
[Read more…]

The Photographs of John Einarsen

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This is the first in a new, occasional series of profiles of Kyoto-based photographers. Each photographer will choose five of their favorite pictures from around Kyoto and tell us a little about what those pictures mean to them. To start us off, Kyoto Journal‘s John Einarsen was kind enough to send me some wonderful black and white images of Shinnyodo; a temple complex on Mount Yoshida. John says…

All these images are from a place near my house where I take walks to find quiet, think, engage with a new visitor, or share intimate conversation with friends (alive or passed on). It contains two temple complexes, Kurodani and Shinnyodo, a cemetery, two pagodas, two bells, dirt lanes, Buddhas and beautiful maple trees. A very special corner of Kyoto!

John Einarsen

John Einarsen is originally from Colorado. He fell in love with Kyoto on his first trip here and settled down here in the early 1980s. His photographs have been published in Kyoto: The Forest Within the Gate and in the new book Zen Gardens and Temples of Kyoto. He is also the founder editor of Kyoto Journal which he began with other poets and writers in 1986. From 2013-2015 he served as an advisor to the Japan Times and in 2013 received the Commissioner’s Award of the Japanese Cultural Affairs Agency. He lives near Kyoto’s Nanzenji temple.

Zen Gardens and Temples of Kyoto by John Dougill and John Einarsen was released by Tuttle Publishing on October 10th 2017. This is “the first comprehensive guide to Kyoto’s most important Zen garden and temple sites” and includes detailed introductions to over 50 Japanese temples and gardens with information on early morning meditation sessions, temple food offerings and special green tea sets along with other “insider” information. The book is available from amazon.com, amazon.co.jp, and amazon.co.uk.

“The exquisite photography of Einarsen evokes the beauty that is embodied within Zen’s philosophy, while Dougill describes the physical constructs that house the illusive yet enduring concepts.” —Judith Clancy, author of Kyoto Gardens and Kyoto City of Zen

C. W. Nicol at Kyoto University of Foreign Studies

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C.W. Nicol at KUFS. Picture courtesy of Jennifer Teeter.

A personal response to the lecture “Planting Trees in Your Heart”

This is how trees got planted in my heart. My father’s hobby was gardening. We had a very nice garden, with a big central lawn you could lie on in the summer, a vegetable patch at the back, fruit trees and flowers aplenty. As a child, I used to spend a lot of time with my dad when he was working in the garden, following him around, asking questions and learning all about growing, living things. On Sundays, he would take me to the park to feed the ducks, and as we walked under the trees together he would point out the different varieties and tell me about the birds and the animals that lived there. One day when I was not much more than four or five years old, my father showed me a wonderful thing: how to grow a tree! He took the pips from an apple, put them into a plastic bag with a little bit of water and then placed them in a warm airing cupboard to sprout. A few days later when shoots had begun to show, we planted them in pots and put them out on the windowsill so that they got lots of warmth and light. Then when they were big enough, we planted them out in the garden to fend for themselves. Somehow, these tiny trees made it through the first winter. I can still remember my father coming into the house excitedly in early spring and saying “Michael’s trees survived the snow!” And so over the years we tended them and they grew, and today they are bigger and taller than I am and carry a glorious burden of big tasty apples every autumn. My father was from Ireland and often joked that one day we would move back there together and “grow our own forest”. I think he was secretly a little disappointed that that never really happened. I suppose I’m secretly a little disappointed too.

Perhaps, that’s why the talk that I attended on Sunday had such a profound affect on me. At one point, during the slideshow, Mewby whispered to me “Are you crying?” I shook my head. No. Of course not. Then once she’d looked away again, I quickly wiped my eyes. This man, Clive Nicol, has grown his own forest! I thought. What a wonderful man!

But I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s backtrack… [Read more…]