lost and found

the 700 year old giant bronze Daibutsu, Kamakura, Japan

A couple days after Christmas, my daughters and I drove north for a holiday visit into the snow belt of upstate New York, where I grew up and where my parents and siblings still live. On Friday morning, becoming stir crazy in the house, my father and I trudged through the deep snow out to his woodworking shop. He lit a fire in the cast iron stove while I stood looking at the hand tools and powered shop equipment neatly awaiting his next project. My father and I are happiest spending time together while doing some kind of work, and he mentioned that he had boxes and boxes of old books that had sat in the barn for years that he needed to sort through and dispose of somehow, so I offered to help. We staggered from the cold, dark hay loft back out to the warm shop with several heavy boxes and began looking through them. I opened the first one, and on top of a stack of art history and theory books, there sat a hardbound sketchbook that I'd taken on a trip to Japan in the fall of 1989, which I'd assumed lost more than twenty years ago. Leafing carefully through drawings of monuments, buildings, and architectural details from two weeks of wandering in and around Kyoto, Tokyo, and Kamakura, the unexpected reminders of things that had caught my attention conjured memories of the old Japan I love and have so missed these many years. Here are a few of those images.

house on a side street in Kawagoetraditional sweet shop, Kawagoe 

Comments

[Neill]

Wow! I love these. That sketch of the sweet shop rocks.

[Terry Carpenter]

These images bring back fond memories of my own time in Japan. I was stationed in Misawa, on northern Honshu Island, in 1982 - 1983, and again in 1984 - 1985. We had the opportunity to visit several places during this time, Tokyo, Nagasaki, Hachinoe, and the northern island of Hokkaido. It was quite an experience to live in a totally different culture for three years.