Jeffrey E.F. Friedl's Blog, page 40

Gargoyle-Tile Workshop Visit Part 2: Crafting the Clay

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The Devil's In the Details

temple-roof demon end-piece tile during fabrication

at the Minobe Onigawara Workshop (美濃邉鬼瓦工房)

Picking up from yesterday's “Gargoyle-Tile Workshop Visit Part 1: Factory Tour”,
we'll look a bit on how these complex decorative tiles are made.

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Old and New

Mr. Minabe shows a current replication project

( his father is the current head of household )










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High-Tech Methods

everything is done by hand

These are essentially pottery, so crafting is “simple”: create the shape
you want out of clay, let it air dry for a few months, then fire it in a kiln for 30
hours at a bazillion degrees.

It's not that simple, of course. First off, with the lead time to the
final firing measured in months, they can't afford to have pieces crack in
the kiln, so they've developed crafting and firing techniques that
completely avoids cracks. I didn't realize how extraordinary this was until
someone else on the tour who happened to be a potter exclaimed her
shock. Apparently some loss during firing is always expected.

Another complication is that the clay shrinks about 13% when fired, so
they have to take that into account when building a replacement piece whose
final size must exactly match the original. They deal with this 13% shrinkage
(building everything 13% larger) day in and day out, so after a lifetime it must all be second nature.

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In Need of a Fang

It's perhaps difficult to tell in the photo above, but the fang in the
near-side edge of the mouth is missing in the version being crafted. As part of the tour, Mr. Minobe showed a bit how he models the clay, and in doing so added
that fang...

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Mold the Shape by Hand

This is probably the most difficult part, especially for someone like me
without an artistic bone in my body. He's got to
get the general shape, 13% larger than the final desired size.

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Preparing to Attach

To create a good bond, he places rough groves in the clay using
the fork-like tool that was the subject of my recent “What am I?” quiz. A lot of people guessed the fork-like tool had something to do with clay, but no one had the proper answer that it's for scoring a surface to be attached to another surface.

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Another bad photo, sorry, but if you look carefully you can see the fang has been attached. He's then using another tool to smooth part of the brow.

Of course, this is just the roughing in of the basic shape. I'm sure there's quite a bit of work and artistry to get
the final sculpture ready for the kiln, 13% larger than the actual target size.

Here's a closeup of yesterday's
“Massive Tile Awaiting the Kiln”...

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Babyface
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Old and New

replacement reproduction (background) air drys before heading to the kiln

At one point while allowed some free time to wander around the workshop, I noticed the current head of the household, Kei-ich Minobe, working on a
project. As it happens, he was about to attach a strip of clay to a work in
progress, so he was just starting to score the clay with the aforementioned
fork-like tool...

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Scoring the Strip to be Added

the Mozart of clay








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Scoring the Attach Point








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Master Craftsman Kei-ichi Minobe At Work

美濃邉惠一さん

He was the subject of episode #57 in the NHK TV “Professional” series, in 2007.
I've found it on the web here.

美濃邉さんはNHKの番組「プロフェッショナル 仕事の流儀」で出演しました。「鬼師 美濃邉惠一」。

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Placing the New Piece









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Pressing It Firm








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Strengthening The “Weld”

As I mentioned in the previous post, my visit to the workshop was as a
guinea pig during a test run of Tour du Lac Biwa's “Special
Japanese Gargoyle Workshop and Hot Spring Tour”. I also got to do the
other parts of the tour (all for free!), except we had to cut the
hot-spring visit short because a typhoon was coming in and we worried that
the train line would shut down, and I had to be home for a late-afternoon
appointment that I couldn't take a chance on missing.

I've much else to post from this tour, and from other tours I got to
take part in. Sadly, a lingering cold this week caused me to miss a
tour that involved zip-lining and kayaking. Maybe next time!

Gargoyle-Tile Workshop Visit Part 1: Factory Tour

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Ornamental Temple Roof Tile

in need of a roof

at the Minobe Onigawara Workshop (美濃邉鬼瓦工房), Otsu Japan
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Japanese temples generally have tiled roofs, with ornamental tiles of various sizes and meanings sprinkled liberally throughout. For example, the demon-face tile
seen the other day on this post:

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Peak of a Temple Roof

In Japanese these ornamental tiles are called onigawara (鬼
瓦) — literally “demon tile” — though the word is used for any
complex decorative tile, with or without a demon. The English word
“gargoyle” is often used for these; it's not really the right word, but
it's evocative of the same concept, and I can't think of anything
better.

Earlier in the summer I had a fantastic opportunity (more on that later)
to get a private tour of the Minobe family workshop, which has been
entrusted to make these tiles for generations. Subject over the years to
weather, earthquakes, war, and vandalism, the tiles end up lasting only a
few hundred years, so much of their current work is recreating and
replacing the ornamental tiles that earlier generations of the family had
created for famous Kyoto temples.

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Mr. Minobe Shows the Kiln

his father is the current head of a household that's been in business for generations








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Storage Area Above the Kiln

it was hot

The huge decorative tiles seen above are still called onigawara
(demon tiles), even though they don't have demons or ogres or devils, or
anything else like that. Here's the detail from the one on the right, of
what looks to me like a phoenix...

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More Storage








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Garden Gnomes

( sort of )








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Ebisu

the Japanese god of fishermen, luck, the working man, and children's health

Side note; “Ebisu” is the namesake for one of Japan's oldest beers,
archaically transliterated on the label as “Yebisu” but pronounced the same. To facilitate distribution of this beer, the company made a train
station near the brewery in 1901 and named it after the beer. The Ebisu neighborhood
of Tokyo then grew up around it. So the station and the neighborhood are
named after a beer, but the beer is named after an ancient deity.

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Kirin

another part of mythology that lends its name to a Japanese beer
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In front of the kirin is a title with a simple flower. There were also things
like birds and fish, and all had meanings. I might be remembering this
incorrectly, but having a bird on your roof (or in your garden) would mean
people would flock there in larger numbers, and having a fish means that
people would return time and again. The point is that there's meaning to all of this
that goes back centuries; it's not just decoration.

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Wide Variety of Demon Tiles








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Massive Tile Awaiting the Kiln

This workshop is not normally open to the public, but can now be visited as
part of an
exclusive tour by Tour du Lac Biwa
(“Lake Biwa Tours”), a new company devoted to English-language
off-the-beaten-path tours in Shiga, near Kyoto.

Prior to them opening their tour business to the public, I attended a test tour for free, as a
guinea pig. I had a great time, and contributed my photos to their cause,
so you'll see some of my photos (and photos of me) on the
tour page.

(I've taken a number of their
tours as a test guinea pig, but couldn't write about it on my blog
until they started business officially. Now that they have, I can start to
write about some of the wonderful experiences I had.)

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Delicate

prior to firing, the drying clay looks quite fragile








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Freshly Fired

it looks much more substantial

The huge demon tile above is the one that I whimsically labeled as the “Japanese Gargoyle of Email Destruction” in my
post about lost email the other day:

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“Japanese Gargoyle of Email Destruction”

my whimsical name; I don't know the real name

It's interesting to compare the eyes on this one to some of the others.
With most of these demon-face tiles, the eyes are bulged out like the huge
awaiting-the-kiln unit above, or like that with deep indentations for the
pupils. But with this one right above, the eyes are empty tubes all the way
in, which means that they'll turn into deep holes of black once mounted.
(In the photo above, what looks like pupils are really holes in the
mounting bracket at the back of the tile, which would normally not be lit
when actually mounted. The lining up to appear as pupils in this photo was
quite intentional.)

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Jumble of Old Pieces

that serve as reference for recreations








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Old and New

creating a replacement for an old damaged piece

Mr. Minobe gave a demonstration of how they work, which will become part two of this writeup.

To be continued...

A Fork-Like “What am I?” Quiz

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What am I?

これ何？

I came across these fork-like tools on a craftman's workbench, and
thought they'd make a good
“What am I?” Quiz.
What, exactly, are these fork-like tools used for?

クゥイズ：この工具は何のためでしょうか？

Tasty Yakiniku Near Kyoto: Hieidaira’s Nanzan

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Ready to Cook

at Yakiniku Nanzan (焼肉南山), Otsu Japan

For the first time in ages, this evening we had a grill-at-your-table dinner at
Yakiniku Nanzan (Hieidaira location).

I didn't have my camera with me, so I'm putting some photos from 2007 (seven years ago!) that I found in my image library.

We go in fits and spurts, but I think this might be the first time this year. It didn't disappoint.

I always order karubi
(marinated short-rib beef), and today had six portions, which are described as for a single person but they're pretty small.
It wasn't quite the gluttons affair of the now-closed
all-you-can-eat beer/BBQ buffet that I wrote about in years past, and since I was
driving there's no beer, but we ate well.

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I took these photos almost a year before my first post on polarization filters, so perhaps
I didn't really know about them yet. Now, one glance at the photo above and I know it would have benefited greatly from one.

The meat shown in these photos is gyutan, a name I prefer to
the English. It's okay, but I much prefer kalbi.

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If you find yourself in Kyoto or Otsu and can get up to Hieidaira, Nanzan is highly recommended.

A Day with Sergey Kolychev in Kyoto

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Sergey Kolychev

at the Heian Shrine (平安神宮)

Kyoto Japan, Nov 2013

I'm finally getting around to photos from last November, when old Yahoo
co-worker Sergey Kolychev paid me a visit. (He's not old, our co-worker
status is).

In the intervening three years since his prior visit he'd
become fluent in Japanese to the point that he can read novels, which just
blows my mind. Japanese is at least his fourth language (after Ukrainian,
Russian, and English), so maybe they get easier as they stack up.

We packed quite a bit into one day. We started out with a visit to the Heian Shrine...

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We then popped over to the Nanzen Temple...

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Nanzen Temple (南禅寺)








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Sergey and a Big Rock

We somehow found a little hiking trail back beyond the Eikando Temple, which provided a nice view of the city through the trees...

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Sort-Of View

of Kyoto








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Memorial Plaque

and a three-legged crow

People often put up little wooden plaques as a memorial of their hiking trip,
such as the bigger board above placed by a group of 13 people ranging from
79 years old down to five months old. I wouldn't have paid the crow a
second thought, but Sergey noticed that it was a three-legged crow, which
is apparently a thing. You learn something new every day.

When then moved north to the Hounen-in Temple (法然院),
which has appeared on my blog of late
here,
here, and
here.

The thin depth of field in this next shot makes it looks a bit unreal...

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Entrance Gate

Hounen-in Temple (法然院)

This next shot, of Sergey standing under the gate, looks a bit unreal because I made a mistake and severely underexposed it, so had to employ
HDR-like post processing to recover a usable image...

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I sort of tried to replicate this old point-n-shoot
shot that has for some reason always stuck in my mind...

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We moved north to the Silver Pavilion and its famous sand
sculptures, which I posted about the other day. Here's one more shot of
the lush moss there...

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Lush Moss

at the Ginkakuji Temple (銀閣寺)
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Growing boys must be nourished, so we repaired over to
a tea cafe for choux à la crème...

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Shoe Cream

at Kitayama Kouchakan (北山紅茶館)

(The Japanese word for this kind of cream puff is 「シュークリーム」 which sounds like the English “shoe cream”)

I opted for coffee, but Sergey is a connoisseur of fine tea, as Fumie can be sometimes, so I've been to this shop many times.

Sergey mentioned some knee pain that had been bothering him for a long
time, so I brought him to the best masseur in Kyoto, Kentaro Kataoka.
Sergey had never had a real massage before, so it was quite an
experience.

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Working the Calf

片岡健太郎の治療院

I've had many massages in America, but after having had massages in
Japan, I'd never classify what I had in America as a real massage. They're
more like “shove some skin around a bit and hope it relaxes you” sessions.
These in Japan are closer to physical therapy. In a blog post about Japanese
massage a couple of years ago, I described this masseur's technique as
“a ferocious pinpoint attack like his fingertips are tactical weapons trying to massage the muscle from the inside out”. It can be very effective, but painful at the time.

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Controlled Stretch








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The Eyes Say It All

first acupuncture experience








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Now in the Arm

(I describe my hit-n-miss experiences with acupuncture here.)

Sergey thought the whole experience was great, so I'm glad that Kataoka-sensei was able to work us in at short notice. He'd been out for his daily jog when I called, and kindly cut it short just for us.

Newly refreshed, we popped over to the Chion'in Temple (知恩院) to see its big main gate...

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Chion'in Temple (知恩院)

A shot from this visit appeared in a post half a year ago, on
“Huge Main Gate of Kyoto’s Chion’in Temple”.

We then moved to the famous Kiyomizu Temple (清水寺)....

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Kiyomizu Temple (清水寺)








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The late-afternoon light was rich.

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Looking Back to the Entrance Gate

of the Kiyomizu Temple (清水寺)
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This World Heritage Site temple is perhaps most well known for its big balcony...

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Better shots of it, from years past, appear here,
and here,
and here.

But it's best of all with a friendly face...

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Late-Afternoon Light

at the Kiyomizu Temple

Sand Sculptures at Kyoto’s Silver Pavilion Temple

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The Golden Pavilion

and its “moon-viewing platform” conical sand sculpture

Kyoto Japan, November 2013

Last fall I visited the Ginkakuji Temple (銀閣寺，
the “silver pavilion”) in north-east Kyoto. It's
named for a building that was intended to
be coated in silver leaf (comparable to how the
golden pavilion is coated in gold leaf). Apparently they never got
around to actually applying the silver, but the name stuck.

As it is today, the temple is noted for its sculptured sand, including a huge Mt. Fuji shaped cone.

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Entrance Stone Garden








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The minor entrance stone garden is not particularly special, with
similar features easily found at other temples. But the main garden raises
the level considerably...

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Perfect

There's also a curvy/wavy raised sand feature that's better seen from above...

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I suppose it's supposed to evoke the sea or water or something, but I'm not sure.

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Curved Edge

a couple of feet tall









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Edge Detail

I'd love to know how they construct these, and how often. I imagine that the sand is quite hard packed, but we've had some monumentally
torrential rains of late that dump a month's worth of rain in an hour, so I wonder how these sculptures hold up. I looked around on YouTube and found
these
three
videos, which give some insight.

A path leads through a more-traditional garden and up the mountain a bit, to give the nice from-above view we saw before.

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Garden Path
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“Moody Trees”

The focal point in this photo is unrelated to the focus point, which may be really annoying to some.
Compare to these shots of similar trees at the Heian Shrine.

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Wide View from Above








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Mossy Slope
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Testing a Couple of Watches: Stührling and Citizen

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A Watch

a cheap watch, but serviceable

As I mentioned in the comments on last month's post about horrid watch-marketing
copy, I've been looking for a nice watch with a combination of features
and simplicity and size that no one seems to make. So after years of
keeping my eye out, I finally decided that “perfect is the enemy of good
enough” and went ahead and bought some cheap watches just to try.

I'm glad I did because I found out some new ways in which what you see in advertisements is not necessarily what you get,
and I also found that what I though was important in theory wasn't always important in practice.

The first watch I tried:

Fossil Men's Chronograph Townsman Navy

$110 at Amazon.com

This was a huge compromise from what I wanted in that it's casual and has stopwatch fluff, but I liked the deep blue face,
and with the bright hands it seems to be eminently readable. So many watches these days, whether cheap crap or an $85,000 Patek Philippe,
don't seem to have basic look-at-a-glance legibility. If you can't read it, what's the point? (I guess the point of wearing
an $85,000 Patek Philippe that you can't read is to advertise that you can afford to wear
an $85,000 Patek Philippe that you can't read.)

Unfortunately, this Fossil Townsman was horrible.

The hands, which look bright in the photo, are actually dark metal with
a mirror finish. If they reflect something bright then you see them as
bright. Otherwise, they disappear into the black of the face (which indeed
looked black, even in direct sun, and not the dark navy blue described by
Amazon's prose and photos). So I couldn't read the time on the thing except
in good circumstances. It was frustrating, so I returned it.

I did the same with the $125 light-cream colored version of the same watch that I'd bought
at the same time, for the same reasons.

Running out of time to enjoy Amazon-US prices and selection before returning to Kyoto, I tried two more watches, and ended up keeping them.

The first is a $165 Stührling Original Symphony Eternity GMT...

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Stührling Original Symphony Eternity GMT

This too is a great compromise over what I sort of think I want in a watch, but for $165 I can give it a try.

The good:

Easily readable across a wide range of lighting conditions, including dim.
The face is not too small (42mm) and the case not too thick (13mm).
Automatic: it has no batteries to need changing, and winds itself.
A fairly simple, uncluttered face. (Photos make it look more busy than it really seems.)
Has a name with an umlaüt. Makes it look old-world classy. Ümlaut means class, you know.
Safe to swim with, so safe in the rain.

The bad:

I wish it was a bit bigger, much thinner, and had a cleaner design around the outside edge.
Such a low price for an automatic (self-winding) watch brings worry about quality.
The date and GMT boxes are too small/difficult to read even with glasses. I didn't even bother setting them.
Luminescent features (hands and dots around the face) are worthless. Fireflys are an order of magnitude brighter.

The “GMT box” is supposed to show the hour in some other timezone, which could indeed be quite useful for me living in Japan,
but I knew before I bought it that the box would be too small to read without glasses, so I'd not be able to rely on it.
Indeed, I can't read it even with glasses unless the lighting is really good.

I can read it in this photo I took for this post, though:

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The face looks a bit busy with the wavy pattern, but in practice it just seems like a mild background texture.

It's advertised as water resistant to 50m (165 feet), which makes me feel I should be able to wear while swimming
as deep as I could ever swim, but the manual says “shallow water”. This is apparently a well-established racket of inflated
ratings used across the watch industry. Water resistant to “10 meters” makes you think it's okay to shower or swim? Nope. The manual says such a rating means "withstand splashes of water while washing the hand, but should not be worn while swimming".

Once you learn the code you can understand what you're getting, but until
then it seems wildly deceptive to me. But it seems to be a standard in the
watch industry.

The other watch that I kept is the casual
Citizen Eco Drive Black:

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Citizen Eco Drive Black

This cost $130 at Amazon. Its primary attraction for me is that despite
being a quartz it doesn't ever need a battery change because it gets
charged via light through the face. The manual
says that two minutes in direct sun will keep it running for half a year.

It's quite readable, but again, the luminescent features are worthless.
When I was a kid you
could literally read a book by the
brightness from the luminescent hands of a kid's
watch, but these days it's all worthless. Geez, a
little radioactivity never hurt anyone.

This Citizen is the same size (42mm) as the Stührling, so I wish it were a bit bigger,
but this one is less of a fashion statement.
Not that I have much to do with fashion
statements anyway. I can't read the date (so didn't bother setting it), but
hey, 19~this one is water resistant to 100m!

Sigh, Lost All Email For the Last Day

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Japanese Gargoyle of Email Destruction

at a craftman's workshop in Otsu, Japan

( email troubles have been part of Japan's cultural lore for centuries )

I've used Emacs as my
primary email client since about 1982, and for the first time in those 30+
years it inexplicably deleted my entire queue of unread mail (about 1,400
messages) when I tried to load the last day's worth of new mail this
morning. Doh!

The thought of losing 1,400 messages awaiting my attention was both
frightening and liberating. Sadly, I keep good automatic backups (in this
case with Crashplan),
so I was able to recover my mail queue as it stood a few hours ago.

As I mentioned
yesterday, I've not been too attentive to email lately so hadn't even
tried to load new mail for about the last day, so anything sent to me in
the last day or so is lost. Sorry.

Most people who send me email don't read my blog so I suppose this won't
do any good, but if you've sent something in the last day or so, please
resend.

(The huge gargoyle seen above is the kind that normally adorns a temple roof's peak, such as the one seen in the following photos.)

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Shoju Raijoji Temple (聖衆来迎寺)

Otsu, Japan








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Gargoyle Detail

Back in Kyoto (with some Cousin-Play Pics from Ohio)

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Cousin Play

Anthony and his cousin Grace

at Grandma and Grandpa's, Rootstown Ohio

I'm back in Kyoto after a couple of weeks visiting my folks in Ohio
and a friend in Milwaukee.

I've accomplished a lot in the week I've been back:

Gotten over jetlag

That's an impressive list for me after a transpacific trip.

I also got a new MacBook pro set up (upgrading from a circa 2010 model)
and replaced, for the umpteenth time, failing Seagate
Barracuda hard drives in my NAS
(giving some Western Digital NAD drives a try this time).

“What I haven't gotten done since returning” is a much longer list, including processing photos from the trip, writing blog posts, or
reading email. So today I'm trying to chip away at this list with a few photos from Anthony's first day of play with
some of his cousins, also visiting Grandma and Grandpa (from California).

Nikon D4 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/250 sec, f/2.5, ISO 100 —
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Looks Cool

but with a maximum speed of a lazy adult stroll,

it was more fun when they were little









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But Still Poseworthy

9-year-old Grace








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Easy Smile








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Lacing Up









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4½-Year-Old Claire

caught through a railing








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Not Quite Soccer








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7-Year-Old Luke

rode until the battery died








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Too Big to Fit

which somehow makes it more fun








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Race








Nikon D4 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/320 sec, f/2.5, ISO 100 —
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After The Batteries Died

I was about to lament on how many photos that I still have to get to from this short trip,
when I realized that I have 3x the photos from
last
year's
trip that I've barely touched...

Ohio-Trip Roundup: Misc Fun Photos

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70mm — 1/160 sec, f/2.8, ISO 220 —
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Crazy Summer of Fun

well, two weeks of crazy fun

at Grandma and Grandpa's, Rootstown Ohio

Our trip to visit my folks in Ohio ends tomorrow with a long trip back
to Kyoto. I've still much to post from this short two weeks, but here are
some random photos to fill out my last night...

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70mm — 1/160 sec, f/4.5, ISO 4000 —
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Trampoline Dodgeball

We ended up visiting ZipCity four times. I posted about it earlier, and will again I'm sure.

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 48mm — 1/100 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1250 —
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Me and Anthony

僕と晏人

photo by Phyllis Friedl







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My Brother Mike

attacking a five-year-old kid

僕の兄







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Transforming

a rock on its way to become a step in a flight of steps

(My squats at the gym finally paying off; “lift with your legs, not with your back”)

ジムの筋トレはやっと便利になりました







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Birthday Boy

Cousin Luke turns Seven

ルックいとこは七才になりました







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Race Results

First place overall, and third in age group

５キロのレースをやって、兄は一位に、義理妹は年齢層の三位を出来ました

My brother Mike and his wife ran a local 5,000-meter race. Mike came in first overall, which
is better than he did earlier in the summer in an 89-mile ultramarathon.
Chickee came in third in her age group.

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 62mm — 1/500 sec, f/2.8, ISO 100 —
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Active Summer

The older kids doing a zipline in the backyard while Mike takes his youngest
for a tractor ride....

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Mike and Claire

Here they are again at ZipCity after 4½-year-old Claire did the big zipline:

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Mike and Claire








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Luke's Turn on the Tractor








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Claire Switches to Backup Transportation








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Grace's Turn on the Tractor







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Pro Driver







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Photo Op for Mommy

Mike offered to give Anthony a ride, but Anthony declined. Maybe it was because the tractor was too slow
after an experience like last spring's go-carts at Adventure World,
or maybe it was just because the zipline was too fun.