Posts from — December 2004

My brother Peter left Sunday morning at 5 a.m. to meet his girlfriend in Thailand and go diving in Phuket. Thankfully, they were still in Bangkok when the tsunami hit.

Boys like trains. I think it’s universal.

A drawing I apparently made for the school newsletter in Kindergarten (1972). I have a vague memory of this. I don’t suppose a public school could get away with such a religious theme these days.
My Mom was the type to save all kinds of stuff and send it to you out of the blue someday when the fancy struck her. This was one of the last things I got from her, in a package which also included a lock of my then-blond hair in an envelope marked “Nils 11 months”. I really miss Mom at Christmas, they way she brought everything and everyone together. My little brother Peter is coming tonight, but just staying for a day on his way to somewhere else. Something about a girl.

Fushimi Inari is the head of all Inari (fox) shrines in Japan, where farmers and merchants pray for rain, bountiful harvests and filthy lucre, as they have for many hundreds of years. Fushimi Inari goes back at least to the 800s, reputedly founded by the same Hata family (huge clan, actually) responsible for Horyu-ji in Nara and Koryu-ji in western Kyoto.

It goes on like this picture forever; thousands of vermillion torii gates donated by mojo-seekers must you walk under, climbing the winding path, ascending stairs at times, for about 4 kilometers to reach the top of the mountain. your retinas will be orange by the time you get there, but there is a rest stop at the top where you can have a drink or something to eat. One time when we were there the Kuroneko man (Japanese express courier) was just arriving to make a delivery, having walked up the same route with a huge backpack.There is no other way.

Decoration by Yoshiko, star placement by Gregory (actually, I took the picture before placement of the last golden bow on the top branch)
We set up a Christmas tree in the genkan at my mother-in-law’s house last week. It’s the first time for me to get an artificial tree; back in California we always went to a Christmas tree farm and got a..whatever it was, Douglas Fir or Scotch Pine. Japan has lots of pine trees, but they definitely aren’t shaped like Christmas trees, so it’s artificial or nothing. If you set up an akamatsu pine, some retired guy would come along and wire up a bunch of bamboo poles to shape the branches and make it look more “windswept.”

We have a lot to be thankful for this year, so I feel a lot more Christmas spirit than the usual cynical commercialism.

There hasn’t been much rain lately, and it has been quite warm as well, but Yoshiko tells me that tomorrow we will shift into winter weather.