Posts from — June 2005

We went back to Yoshiko’s beautician a few days ago to pick up this calligraphy brush made from some of the hair collected at Gregory’s first haircut. As you can see, Greg’s full name and birth date are beautifully painted on there by someone who must have very tired eyes after doing a long foreign name. (Thankfully, no extra charge for so many characters.) I wonder if the artisan painted it with a brush made of his/her own child’s hair?

For the benefit of my fellow uncouth gaijin who may be in the position of ordering such a first haircut memento calligraphy brush in the future (apparently the company sends brochures to hairdressers, so ask there), I wondered aloud whether we should do next year’s nengajou with the brush, but Yoshiko and her stylist told me it’s not meant to be used.

For contrast, my mother saved a few locks of my then-blond hair from my first haircut. I don’t know why, but she sent me the envelope out of the blue a few years ago, shortly before she died.

sign at Kodomo no Rakuen (Children’s Paradise Park). link goes to related recent entry

Hayashiya on the 6th floor high above Sanjo bridge. You shouldn’t leave kyoto without treating me to something here.

A century-old photograph of a Taiyuu and apprentices in their finery at the mon of Shimabara from this highly-recommended book by Kyoto Shinbun. Shimabara was the main pleasure quarters of Kyoto until Gion became more popular in the Edo Period.

A small shrine across the street from the Imperial Palace on Karasuma Street.

I got an email at my Gmail account today that was composed and sent in some japanese encoding format other than unicode UTF-8. the result is mojibake that I can’t seem to decipher, whether by manually changing the format of the page or by tring to copy the text or source code to some other application. OS X 10.3 Safari.

A Kyoto City-designated Important Cultural Asset on Karasuma St. north of Marutamachi subway station. English services on Sundays at 0830; visitors are welcome.

Greg has graduated to little toddler’s sneakers, so I thought for posterity I would get a nice picture of his first shoes, their thinning soles about to shear off.

age 15 months